picks January 05, 2014

Anicka Yi

Featuring a large ice crystal slowly melting in the center of this domestic yet spruce space—a one-time configuration specially conceived for the opening—Anicka Yi’s Berlin debut exhibition “Denial” exudes a Conceptualist vibe, as if it were recreating a sixties downtown loft happening. Contrary to the stylish installation that sees the majority of the show’s pieces lit and nested in the rectangular cavities of a lilac-gray wall and the glistening materiality that ties the works together (think tinted Perspex, chrome rings and bars, and translucent epoxy, with the occasional enhancing supplement

picks October 28, 2013

Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili

Flowers provide the soft yet potent theme to Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili’s neatly installed photographs. This orthodox subject has survived Andy Warhol’s multicolored, flattening economization and Robert Mapplethorpe’s deluxe treatment in monochrome, among more prominent variations on the exchange-value of nature—or, rather, of beauty. The species here aren’t American; as the show is titled, they’re “German Flowers”: austere in their economy rather impenetrable, even chaste, juxtaposed at turns with ghostly fragments of church windows. Yes, there’s an orchid (White flower, all works 2013), but

picks August 16, 2012

Guillaume Bijl

Guillaume Bijl’s debut at the gallery includes four large wall assemblages that convey his ongoing concern with how a culture selects objects to signify its uniting historical achievements and emotional investments. These meaning-laden objects range from the high-minded (such as his fictitious sunken church tower presented as an authentic excavation at the 2007 Skulptur Projekte Münster) to the trite, as with a vitrine populated by ridiculous ceramic frog figurines in Composition trouvée, 2012.

Throughout this exhibition, he continues mining the mechanisms and formal vocabulary by which select

picks May 05, 2012

“AIR Sri Lanka”

This exhibition features works from an international group of artists, all made during individual residencies in Ahungalla, Sri Lanka, between January 2008 and February 2012. The curatorial gambit of art eco-tourism and on-site developmental aid is made clear via a slide show near the gallery’s entrance, which functions both as the retreat’s promotional material and as documentation of the works in situ (mostly scattered among minimalist lodgings surrounded by palm trees).

The French anthropologist Marcel Griaule once scolded his fellow Parisians for insisting that real “primitive” artifacts only

Daniel Horn