Jens Asthoff

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  picks March 15, 2023

  Talya Feldman

  In the exhibition “Cut from Blue Sky,” Talya Feldman mines the thorny histories of racist violence in Germany and mass shootings in the United States. Her interest in these subjects grew out of personal experience—the artist lived through the attack on the synagogue in Halle, Germany, on October 9, 2019—which has also shaped her creative approach as a whole; Feldman now develops forms of representation that let the victims be present, instead of focusing, as the news media is prone to do, on perpetrators and crime scenes, which effectively perpetuates the violence. In this way, Feldman’s art

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  picks November 07, 2022

  Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili

  For Galerie Molitor’s inaugural exhibition, Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili expands on her photographic practice to meld image and architecture. Dusty Days, 2022, an enormous ink-jet print on three strips of cotton fabric, occupies the entire front window. The deep-blue motif of a small pile of swept-up hair cuttings takes on an edge of abstraction by virtue of its size, an effect heightened when read with the reflection of the buildings across the street. Seen from inside, the work has a quiet presence, infused with an air of intangibility. It bathes the room in a soft ultramarine glow. For contrast,

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  picks December 21, 2021

  Niclas Riepshoff

  A point, a punch line, and a moment of dark ambivalence collide in Niclas Riepshoff’s A Stitch in Time (all works 2021). The cartoonish sculpture depicts an elderly lady with a boy over her knee. An enormous silver needle in hand, she appears to mend his pants right on his arched bottom. The object is a drastically enlarged, exaggerated replica of a kitschy decorative figurine, one in a series of similar genre scenes. Inside the cutesiness looms an abyss of repression. Is this grandmotherly care or authoritarian violation? By scaling up the scene, Riepshoff’s adaptation amplifies its menace as

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  picks October 08, 2021

  Lawrence Power

  Lawrence Power is a painter of understated craftsmanship. His palette may be spare, but his techniques vary widely, from bands of impasto applied straight from the tube, to expansive translucent sheaths of pigment, to collaged pieces of canvas, coated with thick layers of color or dyed in pale hues. This multifaceted practice lends Power’s work a markedly tactile allure. His formal vocabulary is defined by an edge of deliberate coarseness. It often takes a closer look to recognize that his raw-built minimalism is based on the rudimentary representation of objects he might have bought at a

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  print September 2021

  Elif Saydam

  The Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof is located in a former train station in Hamburg’s Harburg district, and traces of this past are visible today in the magnificent coffered ceiling featuring the original painted floral decoration from 1897. In their exhibition, “. . . schläft sich durch” (. . . Sleeps Through), the artist engaged with the kunstverein space in imaginative and multifaceted ways. Building on their own distinctive visual language, Saydam adroitly activated painting for contextual reflection without losing the thread of their own narrative—here by designing the show as a commentary

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  picks August 11, 2021

  Monika Michalko

  One steps inside Monika Michalko’s paintings as one might enter a room, drawn in by her characteristic palette of reds and warm blues, sometimes complemented by milky hues, their vibrancy contrasting with bleak and murky tones. Color creates pictorial spaces in which realities mingle: Though tangible scenes—interiors, still lifes, landscapes (sometimes on the verge of disintegration)—are almost always at the core of her pictures; materiality and abstraction appear intimately akin and interwoven, blending into each other, forming hybrids, compacting in complex textures. In canvases like Mauretanisches

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  print Summer 2021

  Liliane Tomasko

  Liliane Tomasko’s art is abstract and yet isn’t. In her exhibition “We Sleep Where We Fall,” the manner in which things attain presence in her paintings became even more forceful than in the past. Some viewers might not even have noticed the referential character of her pictures, and, compared to earlier pieces, much of Tomasko’s new work looks utterly nonrepresentational. Despite their considerable atmospheric compression, her paintings from the early 2000s are clearly legible as interiors or still lifes, showing pillows, sheets, blankets, apparel, and fabric stacked up in wardrobes. The empty

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  picks October 16, 2020

  Tamina Amadyar

  Alongside large-format canvases—abstractions, never in more than two shades—Tamina Amadyar is showing watercolors for the first time. Figurative, multicolored, and intimate in scale, this new group of works, begun this spring, stands in clear contrast to Amadyar’s iconic pigment and gluten paintings, an image type she has developed since 2013. The watercolors have a liquefied appearance, with some clear and some diffuse passages. They maintain an intimate tone, showing fleeting but familiar views from the artist’s immediate surroundings: in devoure and closing time (all works 2020), her young

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  print July/August 2020

  Anna Oppermann

  Anna Oppermann (1940–1993) is best known for her “ensembles”—expansive and complex assemblages of drawings, photographs, notes, and found objects that she developed, often over the course of years, in idiosyncratic creative processes. The fruits of an approach that was both intensely visual and tenaciously reflective, her ensembles are explicitly open works. Oppermann had earlier constructed still lifes but later said that she often found the preparatory work more compelling than the final paintings. At some point, she began simply to leave the constructions up, in part because in many instances

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  print February 2020

  Dasha Shishkin

  At the center of Dasha Shishkin’s work is a cast of characters hopelessly entangled, torn apart by desire, or pleasurably relaxed as they let themselves go. Everything is suffused with erotic tension, surging up and undermining systems of order. Shishkin has long been working on a recalibration of painterly figuration, exploring the human and especially the female figure in relation to pictorial space. In staging her characters, she emphasizes the carnal, keeping their bodies, whether filled with lust or just calmly being themselves, close to dissolution in color field structures. The animal

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  print November 2019

  Anne Neukamp

  This exhibition’s title, the triad “ALT-MOA-BIT,” sounded like onomatopoeia or an abstract battle call but was actually derived from the name of the street on which Gregor Podnar recently opened a new gallery space in Berlin’s Mitte district. In this regard, the title of Anne Neukamp’s third solo show with the gallery performed a kind of consecration of the new location. The first hyphen mirrored the normal spelling of the street name, Alt-Moabit; the second was her addition. The graphic tripartition she thus implemented lent the name a forceful rhythm.

  In defamiliarizing an element found in

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  picks October 15, 2019

  Alexander Heim

  With “Fifty Typhoons,” his fourth solo show at this gallery, Alexander Heim is exhibiting a set of small-format mural reliefs and room installations. The sculptural praxis of the London-based artist is rooted in casting and recasting found objects, often industrial products, in synthetic materials. For his 2012 exhibition here, he made sculptures out of found auto parts: Elegantly cut hoods or fenders were transformed into abstract wall objects, while headlights and smaller autobody parts were reworked with clay and polyester resin, metamorphosing into amorphous forms. In 2015, he squeezed clumps