Tobias Kaspar

SILBERKUPPE
Skalitzer Strasse 68
March 2–April 20

Tobias Kaspar, Hydra Life, 2013, video, color, 29 minutes.

Tobias Kaspar belongs to a generation of young artists connected to an international network, producing art that accordingly peers out from the border of its discipline to explore the bridges between art, fashion, lifestyle, and the business of travel. In his latest body of work, Kaspar questions the extent of this consumerist infiltration into his practice by examining prevailing marketing strategies of luxury and celebrity industries.

At the core of the exhibition is a soundless, twenty-nine-minute video, Hydra Life, 2013, in which the perfectly stylized aesthetic of advertising collides with the experimental, grainy, and often trance-like quality of films by Andy Warhol. The camera guides our gaze, tirelessly scanning the body of a young woman wearing a terrycloth robe—artist Inka Meissner (known for her roles in films by Loretta Fahrenholz)—who resides in the clean ambiance of a hotel’s white bathroom. We watch as she compulsively applies Hydra Life Crème Sorbet Pro-Jeunesse by Dior to her face and hands over and over again, suggesting that the product that promises eternal youth also symbolizes the current socioeconomic imperative to always appear faultless. But soon her face turns increasingly red as her movements intensify; her face is melancholic, eliminating any doubt as to whether she is enjoying this narcissistic self-reflection. The camera then pans over her unmanicured fingernails and unattractive, old woolen socks, a stark juxtaposition to what could have been the crisp image of a television commercial. Even the display of the film reflects this disparity: The floor-to-ceiling projection is shown in a dim former boiler room beneath the gallery’s main floor.

In the actual gallery space, Kaspar presents an eight-part set of selected video stills, Hydra Life (8 Lobby cards), 2013, mounted on white matte cardstock, as well as the installation CoreHL13, 2013, consisting of two curved Plexiglas objects that act as clear fenders mounted on the wall. In the middle, a carefully trimmed arrangement of vibrant green boxwood leaves sits on the wooden floor, seemingly protected by the invisible barrier that surrounds it. To whom this devout, ceremonial arrangement is dedicated remains unknown. Perhaps it is to commemorate a star yet to come.

Translated from German by Diana Reese.

— Barbara Buchmaier

Nick Mauss

GALERIE NEU
Philippstrasse 13
April 26–June 1

Nick Mauss, Uneasy Alongside, 2013, pillow, lead, 6 x 26 x 29".

Citation has always been integral to Nick Mauss’s output. In his current solo exhibition, referentiality leads not to historical references but to memory and the way images get locked up in the mind, slipping out in the process of artmaking. Consider Uneasy Alongside and Validated by the Senses (all works 2013), both pillows that have been splashed with lead and are laid on the floor. Premonition is at play in the symbolic weight of this process: Splashing lead is a German ritual practiced on New Year’s Eve in which a fragment of the metal is placed on a spoon, melted over a candle, and tossed into water—the resulting shape forecasting what the future might bring. On the top of each pillowcase, Mauss has printed a JPEG image that is out of focus to the point of indecipherability, a rendition of what happens behind closed eyes and the way dreams harden into artistic obsession.

Obsession is everywhere in this fifteen-work exhibition—perhaps most explicitly in Memory of a File (Let Go or Be Dragged), a ball of wire mesh that reaches some ten feet into the air and eight feet across the gallery. Faded photographs have been blown up and placed within its layers. The images seem almost sketches themselves—as if Mauss had used the process of reprinting like photocopying until each turned grainy, the shades moving from distinct black-and-white into a spectrum of foggy grays. The photographs, by Catalan muralist Jose Maria Sert, are images the artist says have always eluded and possessed him, here aptly materialized as though caught in a spiderweb of silvery wire, a material that too seems perpetually liminal, integral to building something else.

Likewise, the thirteen glazed ceramic plates that hang about the gallery began as a process of sketching on paper. Mauss inscribed these unfinished drawings into wet clay, adding washes of color. It was then into the kiln, where the fire burned pockmarks into the tablets—creating portraits of artistic accidents, where process eclipses intention. And still, the traces of lines and pools of color seem less statements than gestures, citing memory and not fact, coming together to create something like a kingdom of incomplete fantasy.

— Allese Thomson

Özlem Altin

CIRCUS
Obentrautstrasse 21, Haus 17
April 27–June 15

View of “Cathartic Ballet,” 2013.

Continuing her ongoing exploration of how bodies take on signification and of how images move, Özlem Altin’s solo show functions as a choreography of objects and images that perform the role of subjects and yet reverberate a sense of loss of the very subjecthood they seem to animate. The exhibition’s entry point is Untitled (Mädchen im Baum), 2013, two almost identical black-and-white photo prints, depicting a human figure suspended from the branch of a tree (photographs the artist took with her mobile phone, that were digitally altered and then printed on photopaper). From one image to the next, there is both a change in perspective and in the figure’s posture; this discrepancy defines the kind of Warburgian movement between image and gesture, and between animation and inertia, that is the conceptual fulcrum of the show.

In the main space of the gallery, four portraits centrifugally spread on the walls surround a group of three sculptures in which the integrity of the human figure dissolves into grey, brown, and blue paper surfaces. Consider Untitled, 2013, a photo print of a woman that is covered with layers of ink and oil and delicately collaged paper fragments that conceal most of the figure’s torso and face. Echoing this portrait’s color gamut and materiality, Weak distance, 2012—placed in close vicinity to Untitled—consists of two saggy cardboard panels, leaning against the wall. Coated with frail, ink-treated layers of paper the piece appears as a spatialized abstraction of the portrait, staging the collapse of the image and body as well as of the subject.

While works like Untitled and Staring Back at Him, 2012, call to mind a 1920s collage aesthetic (for example Hannah Höch), the floor pieces are evocative of post-Minimalist sculpture and its return to the tactile register of the bodily and handmade. Bringing these two moments into a loose constellation, Altin’s show invites us to think about the links between the fetishistic desire for the animation of the inorganic, postwar debates on sculpture’s subjecthood (catalyzed by critics such as Michael Fried) and today’s renewed interest in the (alleged) agency of objects.

— Jenny Nachtigall

Alex Israel

PERES PROJECTS BERLIN
Karl-Marx-Allee 82
April 26–June 15

View of “Alex Israel: Self-Portraits,” 2013.

Alex Israel believes in stardust, a magic unique to Hollywood that has the power to turn the ordinary into celebrity. Whereas in his previous output he has acted as director, sprinkling everything from rented prop-warehouse set pieces to reality-television stars throughout his installations and videos, in this exhibition he has turned the wand on himself. “Alex Israel: Self-Portraits” features twenty identical fiberglass and bondo profiles of his head, all stamped assembly line style across the walls of the gallery. Each has been sprayed in gradient palettes lifted from a variety of references as well as paintings by other artists, many of whom have been as bedazzled by Southern California as Israel is himself.

The profile—the artist calls it his “logo”—was originally created for As It Lays, 2012, a beguiling if campy work of talk show–style interviews for which Israel cast himself as host. By also casting himself as an icon, Israel here positions himself within a lineage of artists that mine the cult of celebrity and the rhetoric of advertising. In building his face out of plastic, spraying it with colors evocative of LA, and simplifying its contours into shapes that can be easily reproduced, Israel collapses narratives that constitute the dreams of those who flock to the City of Angels into a single, compact image. The icon is a brand—which today is perhaps the most veracious form of portraiture.

Hollywood has always been Israel’s muse. For him, it is not a place or a community but a way of being in the world. If Hollywood as a way of life is his subject, then Israel is mining not the cult of the celebrity but of the reality celebrity. After all, Tinseltown no longer belongs to Hitchcock (a director who also turned his face into an icon) but to those who dream of transforming their lives into marketable brands. What’s perhaps most magical about Israel is the way he immerses himself in this realm, celebrating dreams that are so easy to dismiss. This places him among the most audacious artists working today.

— Allese Thomson

Maria Lassnig

CAPITAIN PETZEL
Karl-Marx-Allee 45
April 26–June 18

Maria Lassnig, Mann, Frau und Hund (Man, Woman, and Dog), 2010, oil on canvas, 59 x 82 1/2."

The scenes in Maria Lassnig’s paintings depict physical discomfort and friction but are rendered in a palette of bright hues that cause each to seem strikingly jocund. This ambiguity makes these works intriguing—attractive and unpleasant at the same time. Eight paintings, five of them from the past three years, are now on display in Lassnig’s debut at Capitain Petzel. Most of them take up the body, a motif that has preoccupied the artist since the beginning of her career.

Mann, Frau und Hund (Man, Woman, and Dog), 2011, shows a man and woman; their naked bodies almost touch and it seems they are on the verge of kissing. Lassnig makes the bodies glow through a tonal build up of color from dark brown over purple to white. Through the explicit contours, the individuals each seem surrounded by an almost Munch-like atmosphere of isolation in space. A line divides the painting in two parts and opposite the couple is a big dog with sad eyes—he lays on the ground, illuminated in a golden haze. His dominant presence underlines the melancholy within the scene, putting the couple in a second, imaginary plane of the painting.

Lassnig paints her scenes in quick and expressive gestures, juxtaposing her delicate, precise use of color. In Raketenbasis – Missiles 1 and 2, 1989, a field of missiles, grenades, and tanks is grouped in more or less horizontal lines. This is the only older work in the show and is reminiscent of neo-expressionism and the better years of Markus Lüpertz. Color plays a distinctive role in counterbalancing the mood created by the military motif. In small details and single lines a whole palette is at hand, creating an immersive sense of polyphony.

— Jurriaan Benschop

Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff

TANYA LEIGHTON GALLERY
Kurfürstenstrasse 156
April 27–June 30

Max Pitegoff and Calla Henkel, Marlie, Berlin, Spring 2013, archival digital print, 38 x 31".

To anyone who has encountered the work of this artist duo before, Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff’s latest exhibition is an environment that is easily recognizable as their own. Born in 1988 and 1987, respectively, and based in Berlin, Americans Henkel and Pitegoff quickly gained notoriety with Times Bar, a one-year venture the pair began in the Neukölln district in 2011. Elements from the bar live on in their current exhibition, “Nudes in Tanya Leighton's Storage, New Theater Prototypes.” In “New Theater Bench Prototypes,” 2013, four monochrome tiled benches are placed about the floor, while, unobtrusively, a half-empty—or rather, in the spirit of the pair’s practice, half-full—cocktail glass is “left behind” nearby in New Media (blue cocktail), 2012.

The main component of the exhibition is a photographic series of eight seductive images depicting artists—Marlie Mul and Yngve Holen, among others, all friends of Henkel and Pitegoff—doing their taxes. If these artists are recognizable at all, however, it’s only through the works’ titles, for instance Marlie, Berlin, Spring 2013 and Yngve, Berlin, Spring 2013, as each are represented only by the edge of their shoulder or the tip of their elbow leaning over a table. The focal points of the images are the tables themselves, which are littered with receipts, ticket stubs for airplanes and trains to places like Basel, empty coffee cups, and pastry crumbs. Warm lighting lends a serene ambience to an otherwise frustrating and quite literally taxing activity. Through these images, Henkel and Pitegoff home in on the precarity of a project-based lifestyle and the evolving ennui of everyday logistics that comes with being an artist in a rapidly gentrifying city. The series is a generous gesture from artists whose concern with community, specifically that of the arts, and its implication within systems of economics and labor seems to be at the core of their practice.

— Johanne Nordby Wernø

Andreas Fischer

MUSEUM LUDWIG
Heinrich-Böll-Platz
December 1–March 17

Andreas Fischer, Liaison Lackmus (Liaison Litmus), 2011,
 mixed media, 47 x 25 x 92”.

Entering this exhibition, which is populated by sixteen of Andreas Fischer’s machine-sculptures, is like walking into the garage of a deranged hobbyist. These are not the well-behaved machines and appliances that populate our homes and businesses and ostensibly make our lives easier; rather, they are nightmarish personifications of failure, unrewarded perseverance, pointless repetition, anxiety, yearning, and unfulfilled expectation. Fischer has taken found objects and detritus in a predominantly morose palette of white, brown, black, and silver, and fashioned them into motorized sculptures that perform useless functions ad nauseum. Liason Lackmus (Liaison Litmus), 2009, for instance, stages an encounter between a helmet and a menacing metal hook, which latches onto the chin of the helmet over and over, like the incompetent arm of an arcade claw crane. From within the sculpture comes a male voice in German, urging some unseen creature to “zeig sie uns doch einfach mal . . . Wir warten. Zeig sie uns deine Zähnchen” (“Show them to us once . . . we’re waiting. Show us your little teeth”).

Even more sinister in tone is A Good Deal, 2012, in which a leather recliner suspended upside down gestures with its motor-powered footrest and arms while a speaker blasts an endless recording of a man aggressively offering to “put your fears in a bag” and transform them into love. (That should sound comforting, but it isn’t.) Equally mesmerizing is the propeller-topped television cabinet of Rollen and Gieren (Rolling and Yawing), 2012, which opens and closes its doors while the TV inside plays discontinuous footage of the end of the Vietnam War. Both works create a strong sense of suspense—like the annoyed voice in Liason Lackmus, we’re waiting for something to happen. But the pathetic Flagge, die versucht, eine 8 zu winken (Flag, that attempts to wave a figure of 8), 2004, never manages to accomplish its goal, and the agitated voice inside Wirds Bald? (Ready yet?), 2011, is destined to mumble “es wird besser” (“it will get better”) forever. Depending on one’s tendencies toward schadenfreude and projection, the exhibition promises some mixture of amusement and the magnification of all of a viewer’s deepest postmodern anxieties, played out by a cast of minimally dressed machines.

— Andrea Gyorody

Beni Bischof

GALERIE RUPERT PFAB
Poststraße 3
February 2–April 6

Beni Bischof, Tush, 2012, magazine cover,
12 x 9 x 2".

Beni Bischof’s solo exhibition, “Playful Subversion,” opens with a furious scrawl: Existenzängste (existential angst) is written in blue on the wall in the gallery’s first room and crossed out with a red line. Right below, the word “Champagner!” is spelled out in red—as if champagne were a tonic for existence. This sets the tone for an installation composed of works that interrogate pop culture through the images that promote and propagate it. There is a poster of Elvis (Elvis Schlitzohr, 2013) with immaculately cut diamond-shaped negative spaces that have been created by the artist meticulously folding and slicing the image. There is also Untitled, 2012, a stack of four hundred identical posters of Scarlett Johansson positioned on the ground with a deep triangle delicately (yet decisively) scraped out of the surface. Cuts of glossy paper taper down the front of her face and the result is pristine, despite Johansson’s violated face, as flawless in this work as the Photoshopped poster itself.

Bischof’s stated interest in anti-aesthetics—in which the artist practices a form of aesthetic vandalism—is at its most coherent in the second room. Pinned to a wall is a collection of images from the “Meta-Fingers,” 2009, and “Sausage Power!,” 2011, series: fashion spreads and advertisements with actual fingers and sausages extending out of various bodily parts, respectively. What’s stunning about these works is that though they gesture at repulsion, each is marked by a captivating elegance. Despite the obvious ugliness of a finger or sausage hanging from a nose, there is a certain irreverent beauty, as if the artist is suggesting that with enough aesthetic care, the repugnant can bewitch. In The Americana Issue, 2013, for example, a cover model’s face is obliterated with black paint, creating a cascade of texture that forms a beak over her nose.

The intention is not only aesthetic: In the same room, a collage features a list of words taken from newspaper headlines (“Big Bucks!” “Shame!” “Dying!” “War” and, of course, “Love”), which, like Bischof’s other works, exposes the tensions bubbling below popular culture’s contested and contradictory veneer to reveal exactly what has been crossed out—Existenzängste.

— Stephanie Bailey