picks March 18, 2022

Nina Emge

It is a rare thing for a sculptor to focus on listening, and yet with her three-dimensional work, Nina Emge launches a broad investigation of how and what we hear. In her first institutional solo exhibition, “(It’s never too late to) Stop, Look & Listen,” the Swiss artist draws on a range of materials and formats to explore how aural perception and comprehension both limit and construct everyday experience.

The exhibition consists of three curling wrought-iron forms, installed in different ways. Emge anchors the most prominently placed one, Nunca vas a comprender (You Will Never Understand) (all

interviews December 30, 2021

Renée Green

“I’ve never been interested in institutions per se,” Renée Green explained to me over Zoom in late November. “Always more so in the dreaming, in the fictional aspects that open up possibilities of how someone can live.” Amid a comprehensive survey of her work taking place at the Kunst Werke and daadgalerie in Berlin, the artist, filmmaker, and writer and I sat down in our respective homes in the city and discussed the current restaging of a work from 1990. In keeping with Green’s multilayered and associative forty-year practice, our conversation took off from this premise and circulated fluidly

picks November 05, 2021

Kasia Fudakowski

Although it doesn’t exist, the word “continuouslessness” conjures a familiar, unnerving feeling of potential and dissolution. Its inventor, the British born, Berlin-based artist Kasia Fudakowski, employs it here to great effect as the title and prevailing sentiment of an exhibition that combines social and political observation with distinctive comedic flair.

For years, Fudakowski has worked on a series of room partitions that explore the contingency of the form: To stand, each divider must be joined to another one. For this show, she created a Boîte-en-valise-style “travel edition,” comprised

picks May 24, 2021

Matthew Wong

For artworks whose acclaim has continued to grow since their maker’s suicide in 2019—and whose work is often framed by this terrible event—Matthew Wong’s ink-on-rice-paper drawings emphasize a vibrant dialogue between his external influences and his interior life and crucially expand the conversation around his work. The exhibition here foregrounds Wong’s interest in Chinese landscape painting, which proves a rich subject that helps illuminate the artist’s sensitivity to the world before him.

To call Wong’s work haunting is easier than to notice those moments of formal inventiveness and play

picks May 07, 2021

Cathy Wilkes

Across three daylight-filled rooms, Cathy Wilkes releases a drip-feed of unrest that gestures towards the turmoil of being and remembering. Motifs that simultaneously conjure flowers and bombs explode on handmade paper with frayed edges, floated in shiny aluminum shadow boxes. In an accompanying text, the Belfast-born artist writes with welcome directness that “the exhibition shows impressions of flowers and landscapes from my childhood.” Wilkes explains in the following line that she “read about the Siege of Leningrad…a terrible place,” and invites us to anchor interpretation in these first,

picks December 28, 2020

Marieta Chirulescu

In her debut exhibition here, Marieta Chirulescu traverses stylistic and political regimes through paintings that combine the analogue and the digital. The Romanian-born, Berlin-based artist employs strict grids and loose sediments to create work that expresses the mundanity of bureaucratic processes and the conversely alchemical nature of creative ones.

Close to the gallery entrance, an untitled golden trapezoidal canvas conjures an ancient stele; it is moored at its base by a rectangular grid, a Modernist trope that reoccurs throughout the exhibition and transforms a row of similarly shaped

picks October 08, 2020

D’Ette Nogle

For her Berlin debut, American artist D’Ette Nogle takes Sigmar Polke’s 1963 painting Schrank (Wardrobe) as inspiration and title, developing his one line and two keyholes into a three-room presentation that probes the tragicomic ways meaning accumulates and dissipates when we look at art.

The exhibition’s centerpiece is a two-hour long video called materialschrank, 2020, composed entirely of found imagery and overlaid with deadpan narration from various characters. Nogle plays all of them and proves as deft a performer as she is a teacher. Like the best art, materialschrank both alerts viewers

Isabel Parkes