Friederike Feldmann

GALERIE BARBARA WEISS
Kohlfurter Strasse 41/43
September 9–November 12

Friederike Feldmann, PS 4, 2011, pigmented ink on blanched canvas, 78 3/4 x 59”.

Friederike Feldmann approaches painting from a reflective outside perspective—always from new angles—and translates the results of her analytic gaze into an independent formal language. She focuses especially on the core aspects of painting such as gesture, texture, and representation. In the series “Ten Years After,” 2004–2006, pastel paintings evoke the texture and patterns of Oriental rugs, seemingly worn in spots by traces of time. Nearby are newer works that are also minimal, comprising spontaneously executed, rhythmically dense tangles of lines, as with Cyan Magenta Yellow 7, 2007. On closer inspection, this work’s informal gesture proves to be constructed: a pattern of identically curling, superimposed lines that Feldmann applied in meticulous detail with the aid of a projected image. The character of the exuberant lines in Feldmann’s images are never what they appear to be; the specific differences between one’s first and second impressions of the image add tension to the works.

In the exhibition “Die Autorin” (The Authoress), Feldmann has opened a new theme closely tied to her earlier works. She has covered both large canvases and small sheets of paper with lines that gesture at fluid handwriting. They suggest the written word, but remain irritatingly just beyond legibility. On large-scale canvases such as PS 7, PS 4, and PS 9 (all 2011), her cryptic scribbles work perfectly and with just the right flair. With these cursive images, Feldmann navigates the boundary between painting and writing—and unveils calligraphically masterful paintings that suggest the written word.

Translated from German by Diana Reese.

— Jens Asthoff

Cosima von Bonin

GALERIE DANIEL BUCHHOLZ
Fasanenstraße 30
September 28–November 26

View of “Grandville and the Decision at Grandville,” 2011.

The sculptures and installations of Cologne-based artist Cosima von Bonin—whose last solo exhibition, in 2010, was titled “The Fatigue Empire”—bespeaks a culture preoccupied with the idea of exhaustion. Enervation and weariness emanate from her stuffed-animal sculptures, which have previously included a reclining rabbit, a lobster, and mussels as well as less-defined lolling shapes.

In her current exhibition at the Galerie Daniel Buchholz, these figures appear again. Sewn in white fabric, each seems irrevocably faded and threadbare. A mound of stuffed creatures is piled over a white oval table in one gallery while three life-size car models made of cardboard and thin wood panels are installed in another room. Von Bonin’s strange mixture of works creates the feel of an abandoned kindergarten or somnology institute. Her art appears to be driven by a deliberately unfinished quality—a specific take on process, on labor, rather than on the end product, works inside the frame of her present arsenal of artworks—as if exhaustion had kept Bonin from finishing her fluffy, white pillows of figures. Here her collaborator, the musician Moritz von Oswald, is already further along: For “Grandville and the Decision at Grandville,” the Berlin dub techno legend produced pure sound as white noise. It thrums quietly from the SoundSticks that are integrated into small arrangements of porcelain shellfish, suggesting not a way out of exhaustion, but exhaustion as a way out.

Translated from German by Diana Reese.

— Kito Nedo

Timur Si-Qin

SOCIÉTÉ
Genthiner Strasse 36
October 28–December 10

View of “Mainstream,” 2011.

For “Mainstream,” Timur Si-Qin’s first solo exhibition at Société, the artist lined the gallery’s two rooms with thirty-two computer printout copies of posters for the movie Transformers (2007) and overlaid each with plant leaves of varying shapes, sizes, and species. In casual, asymmetric arrangements that do not necessarily respond to the composition of the posters, the botanical material serves a primarily symbolic function. Nature and culture, here framed in stark contrast to one another, nevertheless exist on the same plane. In fact, the logic of mechanical reproduction and the aesthetic of mass culture constitute our contemporary natural order. Si-Qin’s art, in the free rein that it takes on culture, simultaneously embodies the act of consumption and the ethos and forms of digital media. Contemporary society’s dissociation from a state of nature can be seen in the screen-tested aesthetic regime of Transformers, where lines deriving from American car production designate Optimus Prime as the kindred, benevolent protector, and organic design elements identify Megatron as an evil, foreign body threatening destruction.

Occupying the center of the floor in each of the gallery’s two rooms are arrangements of plants plucked from their pots with the dirt still attached, which evoke something between domesticated exoticism and the decor of a quasi-domestic space with exotic elements. In a broad-stroke gesture, a comically oversize blue carpet covers the gallery floor, transforming the atmosphere into that of a waiting room or clinic. The decoration highlights the harsh reality of the space: Since the opening, the plants have wilted, browned, even begun to rot. This ephemerality is not unrelated to the grotesquely short life cycle of consumer goods as well as the pitfalls of simplistic artistic gestures. But that’s the world we live in, and, as we know all too well, there will be a new attraction “COMING SOON”––as the movie posters madly reiterate and Si-Qin’s recent presentation blithely admits.

— John Beeson

Hans-Christian Lotz

LARS FRIEDRICH
22 Rosa Luxemburg Straße
October 22–December 21

View of “Hans-Christian Lotz,” 2011.

Hans-Christian Lotz’s solo debut in Berlin is also the first exhibition at this new gallery. Lotz, who most recently exhibited dirty and rusty white refrigerator doors from junkyards as paintings, has again incorporated readymades here. Hanging in a compact block are four aluminum frames that typically encase solar cell panels, each titled Rain Over Water and dated 2011. In the place of cells, however, one discovers pig brains pressed flat on white panels. Lotz obtained these brains from a slaughterhouse, set them in various preservation solutions, and laminated them between the plastic layers of the solar-cell panels under hot air and a vacuum. The furthest left section reveals a swarm of red-brown brain halves at its center. The other panels have markedly fewer entrails. In all, though, air bubbles filled with condensation form in the periphery of the organ-enclosures, generating shapes that resemble puddles. Seth Price’s well-known plastic-vacuum castings of ropes and bomber jackets are perhaps a touchstone for this work. Yet the reliefs so characteristic of Price’s works are only to be found on the backside of Lotz’s panels and remain invisible to the viewer.

The aesthetic and the status of the rotting organic substances (how long will they last?) also brings to mind works by Dieter Roth and Damien Hirst. A further “imponderable” is provoked by the felt-tip drawings integrated in two of the panels. Drawn in the style of Surrealist automatism, one can discern faces in them. Whether they will retain their chromaticity, however, is hard to estimate, because the glass offers no UV protection. A final work, untitled, 2009-11, which consists of four black-and-white striped postcards behind glass, references the Internet meme Pedobear. It is shown here in an optical encryption. Only from a distance does one see the bear emerging from the pattern of stripes.

A narrative interpretation of this show, which is at once sober and experimenting with various effects and references, appears to be impossible. This is seemingly by design; neither a title nor a press release was published. Instead, the audience is challenged to draw on a personal position and to question the storage capacities presented (solar-cell panels, brain, artwork, etc.) in terms of their action.

Translated from German by Diana Reese.

— Barbara Buchmaier

“Side by Side”

MARTIN-GROPIUS-BAU
Niederkirchnerstraße 7
September 23–January 9

View of “Side by Side,” 2011. Right: Mirosław Bałka, St. Adalbert, 1987.

This exhibition, a collaboration between the Royal Castle in Warsaw and the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin, studies the dazzling cultural ties forged between Poland and Germany through over seven hundred works of art produced in the past one thousand years. The first room of the show presents objects from the eleventh century, an era that marked the beginning of the neighborly relations between the two countries. Here, the focal point is the martyrdom of Saint Adalbert, a Czech Christian missionary who was killed in 997 by the Baltic Prussians. Otto III, the king of Germany, visited Saint Adalbert’s grave in the year 1000, and then founded an independent Christian metropolis in Gniezno, Poland. The doors of a cathedral in that city are decorated with figural scenes from Saint Adalbert’s life. An installation inspired by this story is found in Mirosław Bałka’s work in this room: St. Adalbert, 1987. The juxtaposition of historical and contemporary works encourages critical reading of the images.

Consequently, a section of the show that explores World War II stresses the ambiguity of photography. We see how the medium was deployed as a tool to classify Auschwitz’s prisoners. However, as Władysław Strzemiński’s 1945 series “To My Friends the Jews” shows, it has also served the victims of the Holocaust as a way to reflect and respond. Gerhard Richter refers to this ambivalence in a section from his Atlas titled Reichstag, 1997–98, where he transforms images of Nazi crimes into the German flag.

Curator Anda Rottenberg also presents a smart selection of video and film pieces including Królik po berlińsku (The Rabbit à la Berlin), 2009, by Piotr Konopka, which portrays the postwar history of the Potsdamer Platz via the story of rabbits that lived in the space between the two layers of the Berlin Wall until 1989. Rottenberg’s interest in the power of the individual is also evident throughout the show. A section devoted to the cold war highlights initiatives by Joseph Beuys, Jürgen Blum (Gerard Kwiatkowski), and Elisabeth Jappe. Their works could be considered among the foundation of artists’ solidarity and gestures of resistance, a notion recently challenged by the Martin-Gropius-Bau’s decision to remove Artur Żmijewski’s work Berek/Game of Tag, 1999, from the show in response to the allegations of anti-Semitism from a prominent member of Berlin’s Jewish community. According to media sources, the artist and curator of the show did not participate in decision-making process.

— Sylwia Serafinowicz

“Antic Measures”

GALERIJA GREGOR PODNAR
Lindenstrasse 35
November 19–January 21

View of “Antic Measures,” 2012. Foreground: Manfred Pernice, Aufbau (Construction), 2010. Background: Esther Kläs, 3 Solitare, 2011. Middle: B. Wurtz, The Secret of the Pyramids, 1987.

At a time when the practice of transfiguring the commonplace is itself commonplace, this timely group exhibition infuses the cult of the banal with an uncommon playfulness and sensuality. Some of the pieces shown here endow mundane objects with an expressive presence through finely tuned changes of scale. In Lou Hubbard’s surreal video Hack, 2006, a small rubber horse dragged by a string makes its way amid giant makeshift obstacles ranging from an empty Scotch tape dispenser to a transparent plastic ruler, giving a dramatic intensity to the mechanisms of submission and power. Other works use low materials to poke fun at disciplinary classifications: In Manfred Pernice’s whimsical Aufbau (Construction), 2010, a disorderly stack of modular boxes decked out in patchy pink, blue, and brown paint simultaneously evokes a tumbledown architectural model with fading Mediterranean-style pastel facades, a run-down minimal sculpture, and a ramshackle storage unit. Pernice’s work thereby materializes the unresolvable tensions underlying the value and function of art. Partaking of a comic awkwardness and an endearing homeliness, the pieces in this exhibition empathize and dialogue with one another.

Most comic of all, however, are those works in which the inconsequential and the mundane are literally transfigured, taking on an anthropomorphic quality. In Jochen Lempert’s Stadtstrukturen, 2004, a series of photographs shows pairs of pigeons in largely deserted concrete landscapes. These images draw a parallel between human and avian associative patterns, while testifying to the animal kingdom’s ongoing infiltration and reclamation of urban space. B. Wurtz’s suspended plastic bags are suggestive of human forms and clothing, while Ian Kiaer’s Endnote, pink (inflatable), 2010, a huge transparent polyethylene cushion inflated by an electric fan, sits hunched uncomfortably in the gallery space like a brooding, heaving colossus. Oscillating between the organic and the inorganic, the works in “Antic Measures” mock the divide between subject and object, life and nonlife.

— Rahma Khazam

Dave McKenzie

WIEN LUKATSCH
Schöneberger Ufer 65, 3. OG
November 13–February 2

Dave McKenzie, “Good Looking Out,” 2008, aluminum, plastic, dimensions variable.

Rearranging older works in new contexts is typical of Dave McKenzie. Though the artist is already well known in the United States, “Citizen” marks his first solo European exhibition. There are many noticeable differences between this and prior installations of the works on view (made between 2004 and 2008), all of which investigate what it means to be a citizen of a nation, and, more fundamentally, ponder an individual’s place in the world while exploring notions of belonging and togetherness.

The show’s centerpiece is a two-room work, Good Looking Out, 2008, which consists of seventeen outmoded television antennae mounted side by side on the wall. Instead of receiving radio signals, these spindles bear, at their tips, hard-to-decipher aluminum block letters. The nonsensical text, according to a press release, derives from an accidental conversation the artist had with a foreigner: “ ‘Good looking out’ he said. ‘They broke my teeth out,’ he said. ‘They are trying to push us out . . . .’ ”

The Jamaican-born, Brooklyn-based McKenzie decided to become a US citizen after September 11 in order to avoid a potential deportation. He reprises his naturalization in the work Politics Is the Art of Compromise, 2008, two piles of copied text placed on a table in the foyer for visitors to take. In fragmentary superimpositions, the texts form a “compromise” out of the letters of welcome issued by the Clinton and Bush administrations respectively.

Meanwhile, in the video We Shall Overcome, 2004, the titular protest song plays while the artist, anonymous behind a Bill Clinton mask, walks through the streets of Harlem greeting people. The piece seems to provide commentary on Clinton’s publicity-driven decision to move his operations to Harlem, where he has in fact never been seen. And now, with Obama in office, an artwork depicting a black, politically engaged artist “doubling,” so to speak, as a white president takes on more meaning than ever before.

Translated from German by Diana Reese.

— Barbara Buchmaier

Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys

ISABELLA BORTOLOZZI GALERIE
Schöneberger Ufer 61
December 16–February 4

View of “Im Reich der Sonnenfinsternis” (In the Empire of the Eclipse), 2011, Isabella Bortolozzi Gallery, Berlin.

The list of fictional artists in the history of art is so long that by now it could fill whole encyclopedias. With their current exhibition, “Im Reich der Sonnenfinsternis” (In the Empire of the Eclipse), the Belgian artists Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys add another gloomy chapter to this genre. In the center of it all we find Johannes, a clichéd caricature of a painterly type, whose oeuvre is presented to visitors in the form of a posthumous survey show. Installed, often densely, throughout two rooms and one corridor are about 120 paintings and small sculptures: cheap canvases and paper with dirt-colored streaks, circles, and lines either smeared or applied directly from the tube; a black cross on paper; water-blue waves made from elementary school–grade paints; frottage on stone and wood; silhouettes; and even a painted harlequin mask.

The cheap symbolism, the ugliness, and the offensively exhibited dilettantism act as a general provocation; the art of Johannes appears to be all that “doesn’t work.” Right up to his purported death in 2010, Johannes was a typical “bad painter”; viewers are confronted by their own notions of art education, while in the distance, Anselm Kiefer, A. R. Penck, Jonathan Meese, Jutta Koether, and André Butzer all seem to be looking on. Many of these artists sustain their refusal of the “well-made” right up until they deliver a conspiratorial wink that serves to undo the alienation of their audience and to restore the customary rapport between artist and public. But in “Im Reich der Sonnenfinsternis,” there is no wink. Instead, in the gallery’s last space, the video “Das Loch” (The Hole), 2010, narrates Johannes’s story in fragments and, with its dark undertones, pushes the viewer’s estrangement even further. Johannes, embodied by a sad Styrofoam bust with an artist’s beret and red van Gogh beard, remains motionless in front of an easel: “Nothing will come of this painting, Johannes,” says his muse, Hildegard, from offscreen, her droning voice distorted by an equalizer. “Why don’t you make video films?” With their exhibition, de Gruyter and Thys pose big questions: What is a face? What is a story? What is beauty? What is good painting versus bad painting? The questions are intensified by the form of a doll-grotesque: Johannes. Herein lies the compelling persuasiveness of this show. With the cross-media approach of bad painting and videos of motionless scenes—presented together as a Gesamtkunstwerk—Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys take the art of anti-art to a new level.

Translated from German by Diana Reese.

— Kito Nedo

Paul Laffoley

HAMBURGER BAHNHOF
Invalidenstraße 50-51
September 4–March 4

Paul Laffoley, The Orgone Motor, 1981, oil, acrylic, vinyl lettering on canvas, 73 1/2 x 73 1/2".

The term post-critical has been thrown around in recent years to describe the ideals of hybridity and inclusivity governing much contemporary art. In this context, the exclusive category of “outsider artist” appears antiquated and counterproductive. Reflecting on this contemporary scenario, curators Udo Kittelmann and Claudia Dichter initiated a project space in Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof dedicated to artists who have been largely excluded from the mainstream art world. In the second exhibition in their program, titled “Secret Universe II,” the forty-year career of the Boston-based artist and architect Paul Laffoley is granted reassessment. Featuring over thirty paintings and prints comprising dense interplays between philosophical texts, mystical diagrams, and historical references, Laffoley’s superb draftsmanship frames his paranoid and hyperactive assessments of how history interacts with and constructs the future.

Combining a Conceptualist sensibility with New Age illustration techniques, Laffoley’s works reveal his engrossment in the alternative realities and lifestyles synonymous with the counterculture of the 1960s. His paintings evoke a Philip K. Dick–esque world where history, psychosis, and science fiction come together in ways that are simultaneously thought-provoking, entertaining, and, frankly, weird. Aligning his artistic practice with historical figures from R. Buckminster Fuller to Heraclitus, Laffoley gives an architectural schema to speculative notions and mysterious historical forms, tackling subjects as diverse as kabbalah, the shroud of Turin, quantum theory, cosmogenesis, the work of Wilhelm Reich, and the philosophy of Lucretius. His unconventional theories are delicately spelled out with adhesive lettering on the surfaces of his paintings, conveying his esoteric beliefs and giving the exhibition its legibly driven character. Yet the innovative pictorial arrangements of works such as The Orgone Motor, 1981, and The Eloptic Nohmagraphon, 1989, are often more captivating than the theories themselves. The exhibition provides an engaging introduction to Laffoley’s fascinating career, and exemplifies the move in contemporary art to abolish “outsider” status.

— Wes Hill

“Big Picture”

KUNSTSAMMLUNG NORDRHEIN WESTFALEN | K21 STÄNDEHAUS
Ständehausstraße 1
March 19–November 11

Shirin Neshat, The Shadow Under the Web, 1997, still from a color video, 4 minutes 3 seconds.

“Big Picture” brings together a dozen artists (most of whom belong to video art’s equivalent of Hollywood’s A-list) whose installations in one way or another probe the mindless escapism offered by the traditional summer blockbuster. Mark Lewis’s Forte!, 2010, offers a slow-moving aerial tour of the majestic Alps that culminates in a view of a castle courtyard; from above, the tourists swarming about its grounds resemble crazed ants. A more unsettling piece is Shirin Neshat’s The Shadow Under the Web, 1997, a four-sided installation featuring the artist donning a flowing burqa and running hurriedly through the streets of an unnamed city, as her heavy breathing oppresses us from above. Those craving further disturbance need only subject themselves to the infernal rumblings of Steve McQueen’s Western Deep, 2002, a somewhat abstract work that attempts to replicate the sensory experience faced by workers subjected to the grueling conditions of South African gold mines. But given the time of year, most viewers will likely go in for old-fashioned narrative; here, offerings by the likes of Rodney Graham and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster fit the bill, though the most successful effort is Corinna Schnitt’s Das schlafende Mädchen (The Sleeping Girl), 2001, whose subtle humor manages to unite the listless banality of suburbia with Vermeer’s titular painting, in a short that could have been made by Todd Solondz had he been born in Germany.

— Travis Jeppesen

“The Other Side of the Moon: Women of the Avant Garde”

KUNSTSAMMLUNG NORDRHEIN WESTFALEN | K20 GRABBEPLATZ
Grabbeplatz 5
October 22–January 15

View of Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Bar Aubette (reconstruction), 1926–28/1998, wood, paint, dimensions variable.

With a selection dating from between 1918 and 1939, “The Other Side of the Moon” gathers work by eight female artists whose production coincides with a very fecund period, touching on movements such as Constructivism, Bauhaus, Dada, and Surrealism. Despite their close relation to these major groups, the most celebrated artists in this exhibition—Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Sonia Delaunay, Hannah Höch, Florence Henri, Claude Cahun, and Dora Maar—made works that, as seen here, offer a broader vision of European modernism, illuminating it in nuanced and varied ways.

It appears that the curator, Suzanne Meyer-Büser, has chosen definitive samples of the artists’ creativity: The selection here includes the highly modern designs of Delaunay (a large group of her beautiful fabric designs and patterns are on display), the surreal collages of Höch, the intense photography of Cahun, surreal images by Maar, the experimental New Vision photography of Henri, and eccentric puppets and a walk-in painting (actually a reconstruction of the interior of a bar design) by Taeuber-Arp.

Two lesser-known figures in the show are the Russian-Polish sculptor Katarzyna Kobro and the French filmmaker Germaine Dulac. Korbo’s pioneering spatiotemporal sculpture e.g. Raum-Komposition, 1928, echoes the primary nature of the De Stijl visual language, while Dulac is credited with making one of the first Surrealist films. In this regard, the show also makes a case for a different, perhaps feminine, approach to creativity, one that did not automatically turn to the more traditional modes of production (i.e., painting and sculpture). Yet this is a show as much about artistic circles as it is about individuals. A key point made by Meyer-Büser is the importance of community for these women, all of whom knew one another.

— Sherman Sam

Holger Niehaus

GALERIE DIANE KRUSE
Admiralitätstraße 71
November 12–December 21

Holger Niehaus, untitled, 2011, color photograph, 32 x 26”.

Holger Niehaus’s latest exhibition features still lifes of flower and object arrangements. His subjects are simplified and refined, and they are thoroughly marked by a heightened sobriety. But this quality––something that Niehaus has also explored in his earlier works––does nothing to disturb their opulence and gorgeousness. On the contrary, it is often precisely through this tension that an impression of the arcane is established.

Nearly all of the works are strictly concentrated on the subject. In a pack shot manner, Niehaus often displays the object against a white background, producing a terse sense of space through lighting and control of shadow. He typically drives his arrangements to the limit of abstraction: One of the images from 2011 (all of the works are untitled) merely depicts three pieces of luminous cardboard, all the same size and only touching one another at their upper corners like a house of cards. It is purely an image of surfaces being transposed into space. The subject is focused in the center of the image, but Niehaus slightly adjusts the camera angle in order to create a composition that appears to be a changing, complex, and visually fragile structure.

At first glance, a photograph from 2010 seems to be completely abstract: fields of various blue tones, shining coldly on a blue background. But here Niehaus has photographed the blue of the sky and then rephotographed the prints several times and arranged them on a blue background into a still life that recalls Color Field painting. The effect is very different from another work, from 2011, in which the object is simultaneously visible and hidden. One believes one sees an abstract sculpture, recognizing every detail of its contours––a metal blue-gray that looks like lead; a gleaming red bit of jelly or plastic. But then one realizes one is viewing an enlarged still life of fruit: one blueberry, which serves as a base for another half of a blueberry, and on top of that, a sliced red currant. The image is composed of real, solid matter, yet its subject appears completely abstract.

Translated from German by Diana Reese.

— Jens Asthoff

Plamen Dejanoff

KUNSTVEREIN IN HAMBURG
Klosterwall 23
October 1–December 30

View of “The Bronze House,” 2011.

Plamen Dejanoff’s latest exhibition features work from his ongoing project “The Bronze House,” which the artist began planning in 2006 and which revolves around the construction of functional bronze houses throughout the Bulgarian city of Veliko Tarnovo. Consisting of architectural prototypes, sketches, paintings, lighting designs, and a section of one of the bronze houses itself, this exhibition’s function is notionally to inform viewers about the overall project. That said, the works on display are so captivating as standalone artworks that their eventual realization as architecture almost seems like a trivial pretext. Reinforcing the “in progress” sensibility, the plinths supporting his prototypes are unpainted and the bronze house section, The Bronze House (facade elements), 2011, resembles an archaeological fragment.

Off-site in Hamburg’s port district, Dejanoff has installed a walk-in version of one of his houses, simply titled The Bronze House, 2011. Created from over 150 separate elements that were assembled by hand, the modular work is at once a temporary building, a public sculpture, and a prototype detailing his plan to do for Veliko Tarnovo what Donald Judd has done for Marfa. The structural designs of Dejanoff’s houses refer to Veliko Tarnovo’s traditional wooden housing, which, in 1911, Le Corbusier researched on his so-called “journey to the east.” Le Corbusier visited the city in search of vernacular architecture, hunting down organic and spiritual approaches to design that might reinvigorate housing in the industrialized West.

Aligned with Nicolas Bourriaud’s important publication Postproduction, 2001, Dejanoff’s earlier collaborative practice with Swetlana Heger examined the relationship between art and the economy, with both artists approaching their collaborative works as vessels for critical strategy. In “The Bronze House,” Dejanoff treats issues such as corporate branding and urban design with a lighter touch. Instead of directing the viewer to consider the parallels between art objects and other commodities in the economy, Dejanoff’s exhibition focuses more on the formal and experiential qualities of his creations—enigmatically staging the interrelations between art, architecture, autobiography, and place.

— Wes Hill

Rocco Pagel

GALERIE DOROTHEA SCHLUETER
Nobistor 36
December 2–January 14

Rocco Pagel, Der Gärtner (The Gardener), 2011, oil paint and tempera on canvas, 59 x 45”.

Rocco Pagel’s latest work affords itself a slightly old-fashioned inflection––one closely connected to its radicality, which insists on the beauty of its subject. In “Belle Poule” the Berlin-based painter presents views of nature. Landscape appears in wide expanses and is often dissolved in color, almost to the point of disappearing, while his subjects––plants, trees, groves, but also seascapes with cloudy or clear broad skies––seem as though they are washed in light. Yet Pagel is also charmed by the gradual absence of luminosity; the atmospheres in his new paintings are not always soaked in brightness, but rather unfold in diffuse, broken moods. Blaue Stunde im Schlossgarten (Blue Hour in the Castle Garden, all works 2011), for instance, is a large-format canvas showing a landscape in a thick, polyvalent blue in which both fading light and natural space can hardly be separated. Here, we see a garden as dusky intimation, wherein the visibly dwindling light is plumbed and savored. A similar effect is found in a smaller piece titled Dämmerung am Felsrand (Dusk on the Edge of a Cliff). By partially covering the surfaces of some of the works here with scratchings, Pagel sharpens tensions between illusionism and the concrete materiality of the medium. Other works are constructed in a rhythmic stratum of warm yellow and ocher tones, such as Der Gärtner (The Gardener), and its smaller pendant piece, in which leaflike brown-orange is pierced with sky blue.

All of the works refer to Pagel’s sojourn in France: In an old Park near Fréjus, he painted with watercolors en plein air. While some of those pieces are here, other paintings on canvas with tempera and oil were created in his studio later, thus condensing the aspect of memory even more. Throughout this show, Pagel works on the classical idea of locus amoenus, a fictive nature, which his paintings mirror and integrate.

Translated from German by Diana Reese.

— Jens Asthoff

Inge Krause

GALERIE MATHIAS GÜNTNER
Admiralitätsstraße 71
November 12–January 14

Inge Krause, ohne Titel (13. August 2008) (Untitled [13 August 2008]), 2009/2011, graphite, pastel, acrylic, cotton, Alu Dibond, 23 1/2 x 33".

Inge Krause’s latest exhibition includes portions of four new series of drawings, as well as an early Polaroid work. Krause has until now been known primarily for her unique process of painting: She pours numerous fine transparent layers of acrylic, with only occasionally a minimal pigmentation; the resulting paintings have the most delicate nuances of color and an inconceivable dimension of depth. The current exhibition, completely devoid of paintings, shows how Krause translates such qualities into the medium of drawing while preserving its autonomy. For her drawings, she has developed a graphic language as rigorous as that found in her paintings.

The source material for the works on view consists of photographs and text from daily and weekly papers, much of which inevitably contains current political references, appearing here as decontextualized snippets. For the most extensive and ongoing series so far, “endless headline,” 2011–, Krause draws with a pencil on white paper, each time including a newspaper image rendered in flowing filigrees of densely layered, short pencil strokes, carved out in various shades of gray. Afterward, she places a matte bonding sheet on one part of the surface, raises it, and glues it back again a few millimeters askew. The graphite that adheres to the bonding sheet produces a blurriness that makes the motifs appear like the vague images of memory.

The jet-black works in the series “ohne Titel (13. August 2008)” (Untitled [13 August 2008]), 2009/2011, also refer to newspaper content, but in this case specifically to front-cover images from August 13, 2008. The pieces have a strong painterly effect, though in fact they are graphite and pastel on cotton mounted on Alu Dibond and then coated with clear acrylic. The shared date creates a formal simultaneity among all the images: They not only stand for publicly communicated events, but they also reshape these occurrences into dreamlike reflections that themselves seem unknowable—images that release the representation of the present into a cross-dissolve of seeing, foreshadowing, and remembering.

Translated from German by Diana Reese.

— Jens Asthoff