Jonas Burgert

BLAINSOUTHERN | BERLIN
Potsdamer Straße 77–87
April 28–July 7

Jonas Burgert, Suchtpuls (Addicted to Pulse), 2011, oil on canvas, 13' 1 1/2" x 22' 7 5/8".

Jonas Burgert’s paintings and sculptures in “Gift gegen Zeit” (Poison Against Time) draw the viewer into a world in which everyone has lost their sense of “narrative gravity”—to borrow philosopher Daniel Dennett’s phrase—through which one’s conception of self is produced. The environment Burgert’s gaunt beings inhabit, and which helps to orient their lives, is in ruins. But more than that is gone. They have lost themselves; these blank-faced creatures are just going through the motions of their everyday lives, automatons in a world free of teleology. Suchtpuls (Addicted to Pulse), 2011, depicts a jumble of religious and ritualistic activity; hollow-eyed people in ghostly white occupy the painting’s right-hand corner, gazing expectantly toward the work’s center, where a bundle of pigs and people is being either lowered into or raised out of a grafitti-red liquid, in which others languorously bathe. Are they being sacrificed or cleansed? The painting contains so many stories it had to be big—it’s over ten feet tall and wide. At the other end of the gallery, which formerly contained a newspaper’s printing presses, Luft nach Schlag (Air after Hit), 2012, portrays a lone man standing in what looks to be the same apocalyptic urban setting, but with the chaos and liquid gone. Was he at the center of humanity’s downfall? His empty face offers only an ambiguous answer. Each of the other eighteen paintings contains more zombielike creatures making their way through a storyless world. Three bronze sculptures, two of which dwarf the size of any human viewer, further develop Burgert’s dystopia by portraying three-dimensional inhabitants of that realm. Burgert’s works tell the tale of a fascinating, grotesquely beautiful world, and seeing his creatures lost in their memoryless lives we are reminded that it is stories which, strung together, make up our ongoing personal narratives.

— Aaron Bogart

Martin Boyce

JOHNEN GALERIE
Marienstrasse 10
April 27–June 23

Martin Boyce, A Constellation (of fallen petals on a table top), 2012, Jesmonite, steel, painted steel, 61 1/2 x 86 1/2 x 2”.

It seems fitting that Martin Boyce’s first solo exhibition since winning the 2011 Turner Prize is in Berlin, the city where he deciphered, Rosetta Stone–like, Jan and Joël Martel’s Arbre cubiste (Cubist Tree). Several of these fifteen-foot-tall concrete trees were exhibited in 1925 at the Exposition des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris, where they were promptly ridiculed by the press and then destroyed. Boyce discovered a photograph of this work in 2003 (only a maquette survives, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York), analyzed the trees’ series of interlocking shapes, and started to use these forms in his work.

Every piece in Boyce’s poetic, moody show derives some formal element from the private hieroglyphic of the concrete tree: the polygonal Prouvé-inspired library table at the show’s center; the colored lanterns strung across the ceiling; a perforated steel mask on its turquoise dais; and two concrete wall sculptures embossed with a metal type of Boyce’s own creation, the font derived from letters he found hidden in the tree’s trunk and leaves. The result is ravishing and thought-provoking, despite—or perhaps because of—Boyce’s self-imposed strictures. “Do my sculptures dream?” Boyce poses the question in an interview with curator Christian Ganzenberg; staring at the unapologetically gray A Constellation (of fallen petals on a table top), 2012, one may well ask the same thing. Like us, he’s interested in the traces we leave on things, and the traces they leave on us in turn.

In an adjoining room hang a suite of twenty-five crepuscular photos from Boyce’s travels that both reflect and inspire his work. Boyce has leached most of the color from these dark and intimate giclée prints, leaving suggestions of muted blue or green on his mostly architectural and natural subjects—not a concrete tree to be found. Casual graffiti on an agave plant recalls the dreamy schoolboy etchings on the table in the next room, and out of the circular windows of an apartment building in Lebanon curtains hang like lazy tongues, lapping at freedom. Considering Boyce’s output, we can only wonder how these images might spring into service for his work in the future.

— Tara Smith

Brian O’Doherty

GALERIE THOMAS FISCHER
Potsdamer Straße 77-87, Haus H
April 14–June 9

Brian O’Doherty, Portrait of Marcel Duchamp: Lead 1, 1966, wood, glass, Liquitex, motor, 17 x 17 x 8’.

Brian O’Doherty’s overdue solo debut in Germany centers around Portrait of Marcel Duchamp, a series of objects that begin with a cardiogram O’Doherty made of the famed French artist in 1966. On entering the show, viewers encounter Duchamp Boxed, 1968, the original electrocardiographic tracing, rolled up like a scroll in a small blue-gray cardboard box. The thin red lining and blue sheath inside the box evoke the delicate tissues and arteries inside the absent body that haunts O’Doherty’s “portrait.”

From the cardiograph, O’Doherty (a trained doctor) also made Portrait of Marcel Duchamp: Lead 1, 1966, which mimics the function of an oscilloscope. Inside a wooden box, a light flickers across a circular screen, tracing Duchamp’s heartbeat in real time. The traditional notion of portraiture as a visual representation of the sitter’s personality is here transformed into a semiotically coded trace of the body. Its effect, however, is all the more powerful: O’Doherty recorded Duchamp’s heartbeat and simultaneously had his finger on the pulse of the time, in which questions of authorship, identity, and the role of the viewer were the focus of a discursive shift that still resonates today.

O’Doherty’s ongoing series of “Rope Drawings” are an intriguing effort to intertwine the spatial and visual experience of the viewer with the object of art. Bird (for Charlie Parker), 2012, which was commissioned for this show, consists of geometric shapes painted on a wall, their lines traced and extended into space by ropes that are stretched between the gallery walls and floor. Activated by the viewer’s movement, the ropes form a temporary array of lines that are as fleeting as a memory or a sudden thought. “You draw to see what you think,” O’Doherty wrote in a notebook from the 1970s. His drawings, one might add, are indeed compelling thoughts.

— Jenny Nachtigall

Wim Wenders

DEICHTORHALLEN HAMBURG
Deichtorstrasse 1 + 2
April 14–August 19

Wim Wenders, Beetle Cemetery in Coober Pedy, 1988, C-print, 5' 10 1/8" x 14' 8 1/8".

In films such as Paris, Texas (1984), The End of Violence (1997), and Palermo Shooting (2008), Wim Wenders presents seemingly frivolous characters who slowly reveal their intricate life stories amid picturesque surroundings. Some of these environs now take center stage in “Places, Strange and Quiet,” which consists of over sixty photographic works that were taken between 1983 and 2011 in countries around the world. Having established a reputation for his idiosyncratic treatments of the road-movie genre, here Wenders similarly deals with images of itinerancy, capturing transient moments in peculiar locations. Predominantly comprising expansive, open-air scenes rather than details, photographs such as Country Cemetery, 2008, Forest Piece, 2011, and Petrol Station in Alaverdi, 2008, appear to be the work of a photographer who one day wandered off course. It is in this sense that the exhibition is infused with Wenders’s biographical information, not because of his celebrity status but because his peripatetic lifestyle is integral to his multidisciplinary practice.

Focusing on human encroachment on natural environments, Wenders’s exhibition provokes reflection on how one’s sense of place can manifest in conditions that might otherwise be considered uninspiring or sterile. Signs of industrial decrepitude are depicted in scenes of a ramshackle car yard in outback Australia for Beetle Cemetery in Coober Pedy, 1988; fungus growing on an air conditioning system appears On a Skyscraper, 2008, in São Paulo; and graffiti adorns a building site in Berlin in Alles oder Nichts (All or Nothing, 2008). In contrast to the dryly observant style of German photography that Bernd and Hilla Becher inspired at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in the 1980s, Wenders, who grew up near the industrial landscapes of Düsseldorf, attempts instead to generate emotional responses from viewers, occasionally provoking a sense of nostalgia for places that they have never even visited.

— Wes Hill