Barbara Buchmaier

• 

  picks March 28, 2016

  Stefan Wissel

  After having passed through the foyer, where a motor-operated waving hand—Eröffnung (Opening), 2016—welcomes the viewer, one is invited to walk among Stefan Wissel’s twenty-three objects and installations arranged on the floor and the wall. This spacious and sportive scenario includes works dating from 1998 to 2016 that are all connected by their flawless manufacture, as seen in pieces such as Laube (Arbor), 2004, an elegant black powder-coated sheet-steel sculpture that sustains a canopy as if to offer shelter, and Playstation, 2002, an extensive construction made from chromed brass tubing and

• 

  picks July 17, 2015

  Lukas Quietzsch

  Lukas Quietzsch’s first-ever solo show has many components: a hand-built vitrine, nine paintings, a cell-phone number printed on the exhibition invite, a puzzling press text written in collaboration with artist Philipp Simon, and a provocative title—“You Are a Pig.” Dialing the phone number, you reach a message by street performer Matthew Silver, whose proposal that “love is the answer” must necessarily be doubted. One key issue can be identified across these different media: The artist is questioning neoliberal recipes for success and the increasing demand to decide between yes and no, right

• 

  picks May 02, 2015

  Paul Branca

  Visitors to Paul Branca’s second solo exhibition in Berlin are welcomed with a press release printed on wax paper and garnished with a slice of mortadella (Press Release, all works 2015). After exhibiting a series of paintings in Bologna, Italy, last year that depict linked sausages, the artist here continues his painterly research into sausage-like forms and their potential meanings.

  In the center of “Piggish” are four oil paintings, Untitled (glyph #1–4). On each, one finds an elegant composition of one or more sausages against a white background accompanied by a monochrome shadow. The sausages

• 

  picks April 23, 2015

  “Artfan”

  From 1991 to ’95 in Vienna, the artists Linda Bilda and Ariane Müller published the zine Artfan for thirteen xeroxed and stapled issues, each in an edition of eight hundred. Their intention was to give artists a voice, including in long-form interviews with the likes of Jutta Koether, Martin Kippenberger, Andrea Fraser, and Fareed Armaly, who were all based around Cologne and New York at that time. The seemingly unedited dialogues were also accompanied by hand-drawn illustrations, photo stories, and reviews.

  Situated in an unfurnished apartment, this exhibition gives a retrospective and somewhat

• 

  picks April 01, 2013

  Tobias Kaspar

  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

• 

  picks January 04, 2013

  Alexander Hempel

  This spare, eponymous exhibition of recent work by performance artist Alexander Hempel features three monochrome canvases that are each painted a primary color. Staged as “ready-made paintings” they are accompanied by an album containing 110 color photographs. When leafing through this book, which offers scenes of Hempel performing in front of audiences, one realizes that one is standing directly on the stage where he recently performed and that the accompanying paintings were stage props for his two recent untitled performances.

  In these performances, as in his previous ones, Alexander Hempel

• 

  picks March 23, 2012

  Julia Haller

  In the entrance to this eccentric exhibition space––an art gallery in an innovative travel agency (Diko-Reisen)––one is greeted by the first work (all are untitled and 2012) in Julia Haller’s show: a grid of nine paintings in thin wooden frames. Over these brown and off-white linen canvases stretches a large colorful motif that is reminiscent of a mandala. On closer observation, one perceives that the blue outline encircling the yellow and pink hues is slightly off, as in a defective silk screen, generating an ornament that appears to show several ice-cream cones or, inversely, bishops’ heads

• 

  picks January 04, 2012

  Dave McKenzie

  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

• 

  picks November 30, 2011

  Hans-Christian Lotz

  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

• 

  picks September 13, 2011

  Benjamin Saurer

  The Berlin-based artist Benjamin Saurer is known for his small, luminous paintings, which feature painstakingly precise layers of paint and wax batik. Often the canvases depict cartoonlike scenes that satirize the art world; in some he has rendered figures that seem to be engaging in ideologies or spiritualism without realizing that they themselves are corrupted by this system. It requires a very precise gaze, however, to decode these scenarios. “Consensus Sauna,” his current exhibition in Sankt Georgen, is located in a storefront space, and, in keeping with the title of the show and many of

• 

  picks July 12, 2011

  Sebastian Stumpf

  At the center of Sebastian Stumpf’s video installations and photographs, there is always his own body, which he stages in artistic and subversive actions that refer to the space of the city. In his first solo exhibition at the recently opened Galerie Thomas Fischer, which is located in a former apartment in an old building, Stumpf presents four works that respond to the four rooms of the space. These include seven photographs from the series “Highwalk,” 2010, for which the artist swung––much like a stuntman or traceur––above the balustrades of the Highwalk at the Barbican Estate housing complex

• 

  picks April 20, 2011

  “Lost Form”

  Anyone familiar with this gallery’s program, which primarily features abstract and representational painting and sculpture from Dresden-based artists, will be surprised by the open-ended title of this group show. Here, works by gallery artists are installed alongside art by two guests, Wilhelm Müller (1928–1999) and Jennifer Jordan, which is all the more surprising. The show seems to act like a parcours within which one can continuously pose an elementary question concerning form: Is it lost? Or has it already been found again?

  Near the entrance, visitors are greeted by an imposing untitled