print May/June 2020

Hans-Christian Lotz

The works: all Untitled, 2020, organized in two groups. The exhibition: likewise untitled. Additional information: nil. Hans-Christian Lotz clearly didn’t much care to communicate with the audience or provide any overarching ideas for context. And the objects on view seemed to insist on the hard facticity of their industrial materials, some nerdily technical, others metallically cold, but all appearing peremptory and forbidding.

The gearhead faction consisted of three pieces in which metal rods, looking a bit like inverted pendulums, are each topped with a single flower. The thin shafts mounted

print April 2020

Susanne Paesler

The title of this exhibition was blunt: “Pattern Recognition.” Selected by the gallery together with the curator Tenzing Barshee, the paintings on view sported abstract patterns in the narrow and almost banal sense of the word: stripes, chessboards, rectangles. Dating from the first half of the too-brief career of the Berlin-based painter Susanne Paesler, who died in 2006 at the age of forty-three, these works were made between 1991 and 1998—an interregnum between painting’s comeback of the 1980s and its revival of the 2000s.

Perhaps that interval of diminishing stakes and fading significance

print May 2019

Henrike Naumann

Henrike Naumann’s first exhibition at KOW was about history in the broadest sense of the term. More precisely, it was a reflection on memory and the mechanisms through which recent history is written by still more recent history, as well as a study of the ways in which the now defunct German Democratic Republic figured in collective East German memory during the 1990s. The exhibition’s title was the portmanteau word Ostalgie—a contraction of the German words for east and nostalgia—which has come to describe nostalgia for everyday life in East Germany before it was exposed to the hardships of

print April 2019

Daniel Pflumm

Daniel Pflumm’s exhibition at Galerie Neu—his first solo show in fifteen years at his Berlin gallery, featuring his first new video works in more than a decade—had the makings of a comeback. Pflumm built a reputation in the club scene of post-1989 Berlin, launching the now-legendary techno venues Elektro and Panasonic. By the turn of the millennium, he was gaining more and more recognition in the art world, which thrilled to his fast-cut videos and light boxes with gutted brand logos. Then, suddenly, the artist disappeared from view. A lot has happened since then: The city, technology, and the

print March 2011

Karla Black

In recent years Karla Black has become famous for sculptures made of untreated, pastel-colored powdered plaster, ghostly accumulations of plastic sheeting that appear to have been casually, carelessly left to hang in midair, and incredibly fragile-looking paper objects that can stand up on their own but look as if even the slightest breeze would topple them. In short, she has been exploring the ephemeral qualities of enduring transitional states, which she has inscribed in the floury or scraggy bodies of sculptures that are balanced perfectly on the edge between form and anti-form. Her recent

print February 2011

Stefan Müller

Let’s not beat around the bush: Stefan Müller’s “Salon der Daheim-gebliebenen” (Salon for the Ones Who Stayed Home) was a straight-up painting show. And as so often happens when painting starts to get interesting, it was treated here as “material”—both literally, with respect to the “material” of canvas and its preparation, and figuratively, as a self-reflexive “theme,” a set of various basic elements that can be shuffled and interwoven in many different ways.

The process of painting, Müller reminds us, begins already with the various textures of the canvases and materials as well as the

print January 2011

Tobias Madison

The title of Tobias Madison’s recent show was the tautological mantra “Do It to Do It,” a phrase borrowed from Donald Trump’s 1987 book, The Art of the Deal. This information—presented in the small accompanying catalogue—laid a trail from the outset: The exhibition was likely to be about the entrepreneurial side of making art and being an artist. Entering the show itself, one was immediately struck by the large number of collaborations, for example, Bora Bora Structure for Munich, 2010, created in collaboration with Kaspar Müller: hammocklike seats and other objects, all made of bamboo,

print October 2010

Katarina Zdjelar

First comes the music. Even before the first images appear in Katarina Zdjelar’s seven-minute-long video Shoum, 2009, one of three works in her recent exhibition “One or Two Songs,” we hear the first measures of the 1984 Tears for Fears megahit “Shout.” And only afterward do the images arrive: We see an iPod, a sheet of paper, but above all hands, chapped hands with unkempt, dirty fingernails—the hands of hardworking men—holding pens. Over the course of the next seven minutes, two men—who, as the press release informs us come from Belgrade—attempt to decipher the lyrics of “Shout” as though they

interviews June 03, 2010

Damien Hirst and Michael Joo

Damien Hirst and Michael Joo have organized an exhibition of their works at Haunch of Venison’s cavernous Berlin branch, and have titled it “Have You Ever Really Looked at the Sun?” Here, both artists discuss the show, which is on view until August 14, as well as their long friendship.

“HAVE YOU EVER REALLY LOOKED AT THE SUN?” is derived from a joke about snowmen. One asks another: “Can you smell carrots?” Of course, snowmen can’t smell carrots, not only because they can’t smell but also because it’s the very material their noses are made of. So in response to that, we’re asking this question

previews May 2010

6th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art

The sixth edition of the Berlin Biennale has moved not only from spring to summer but, once again, locations. Besides its usual KW headquarters in the city’s center, the 2010 iteration will concentrate activity in Kreuzberg, a former West German borough. Nearly three hundred works from an international roster of fifty artists—including Phil Collins, Cameron Jamie, and Danh Vo—are intended to interrogate how and where art and reality intersect. To contextualize that interesting if broad thesis, curator Kathrin Rhomberg has invited art historian Michael Fried to curate

print May 2010

William E. Jones

“I announce the destruction of the cinema, the first apocalyptic sign of disjunction, the rupture of this bloated organism known as a film.” These forceful words emanated from loudspeakers in a monotone computer voice in the video installation Discrepancy, 2009–, the centerpiece of William E. Jones’s first solo show in Berlin. The text is not by Jones, however, but by Isidore Isou, the founding father of Lettrism, the radical literary and artistic movement now mainly remembered as a precursor to Situationism. And yet Isou’s manifesto-like call, taken from the film Traité de bave et d’éternité

print May 2010

Clemens von Wedemeyer

Galleries often re-present works commissioned for other contexts, but rarely do they expand on them. This is precisely what’s been done, however, at Koch Oberhuber Wolff for its solo show by Clemens von Wedemeyer. “The Fourth Wall,” 2009, consists of nine videos and films conceived for London’s Barbican Art Gallery and exhibited there last year. Here this project was supplemented by photographs, wall texts, a sound document, and vitrines filled with books and a copy of National Geographic. The work’s thematic reference point is the story of the Tasaday, an ethnic group with only twenty-four

Dominikus Müller