Kristian Vistrup Madsen

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  diary May 01, 2019

  Shark Tank

  ON FRIDAY, I FLEW TO CÔTE D’AZUR in a private jet, and I am happy to confirm that the Alps are still snowcapped—it’s not all over quite yet, then. The lunch excursion was to Art Monte Carlo, an event that inserts itself into Berlin Gallery Weekend by making available a private shuttle. A luminously beautiful girl who sat with me on the plane got several hundred likes for a selfie taken in its cream leather interior. “Instagram is like alcohol: It manufactures the lack that drives it,” said a Greek collector with indigo eyeshadow who otherwise kept quiet. Her gold bangles rattled as our Mercedes

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  print May 2019

  Norbert Schwontkowski

  In Norbert Schwontkowski’s painting Ohne Titel (Dach) (Untitled [Roof]), 2009–12, a group of birds sit on a grid of white roof tiles. These birds are dotted so casually onto the canvas they hardly register as living beings—we wouldn’t wait for them to take off. Schwontkowski’s paintings dip in and out of figuration in the way life does: Sometimes we understand what’s going on around us, but most of the time everything’s a bit of a blur.

  “Die von Da” (Those from There) presented an outtake of the late German artist’s works across three decades. The principle behind the selection seems to have been

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  print April 2019

  Poul Gernes

  Herlev Hospital, on the outskirts of Copenhagen, is the tallest building in Denmark, and Poul Gernes’s complete interior decoration of that structure remains the largest painting in the country, perhaps in the world. Yet few of the patients who experience it may recognize it as art, for Gernes’s work is as resistant to categorization as it is eye-catching. Not only does his painterly world cut across the borders among Fluxus, Pop, Op, Minimalism, and Conceptual art, it also effaces the distinction between art and design. Gernes (1925–1996) championed the decorative, and insisted on popular access

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  picks February 13, 2019

  “Bubble Metropolis”

  The gallery is bathed in dust-blue light and the tremor of Calder Harben’s sound installation Bodies of Water, 2017–, which is audible only through the excision of everything else. Entering “Bubble Metropolis,” you’re given not just earplugs, then, but also a second layer of over-ear protection. Five recordings, each from a different location, document the auditive consequences of industry and traffic on marine environments. From a highway bridge by Umeå in the north of Sweden, vibrations shoot through the concrete pillars into the river below, unleashing a series of gut-wrenchingly deep

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  print January 2019

  Simon Fujiwara

  Rules are made to be broken, they say, but sometimes obeying is just as good a way to cop a thrill. Entering Simon Fujiwara’s installation Empathy I, 2018, you had to draw a number, then sit down on an airport-style chair and wait your turn. The room was totally non-descript, furnished only with the chairs, a table, a water cooler, and some reading material: two dozen copies of E. L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey (2011), all bookmarked at the page listing the rules of engagement between the novel’s submissive protagonist and the dominant Mr. Grey.

  What visitors were waiting to enter, two at a

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  print January 2019

  Mathis Altmann, Bonnie Camplin, Salvo, Lucie Stahl, Amelie von Wulffen

  Arguing against reductive reason, the German Jewish art historian, poet, and anti-fascist of the interwar period Carl Einstein wrote,  “Every structuring is a complex function.” Whether that structuring takes the form of a city or a group show, his statement (included in the press release to this exhibition) continues to ring true. Since 2009, as part of the “Curated by” initiative, Viennese galleries have invited guest curators to mount exhibitions under a given theme—last year’s was the somewhat unwieldy “Viennaline.” In response, Melanie Ohnemus

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  print October 2018

  Norbert Kricke and Ernst Wilhelm Nay

  What occasioned the painter Ernst Wilhelm Nay’s fall from grace, beginning with attacks published in the newspapers Die Zeit and Der Tagesspiegel in 1964, was not so much his art itself as the immense esteem in which it had been held in the German art scene. It’s been said that in light of Nay’s prominent participation in the first three Documenta exhibitions, for the first two decades after World War II the artist was to Germany what Henry Moore was to England, and what Jackson Pollock was to the United States. An emblem of the old guard, he was considered invincible, but by the 1960s his wholly

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  picks May 11, 2018

  Cosima zu Knyphausen

  Obscuring the windows of the gallery and lending its title to the exhibition, The drapes were light (all works 2018) depicts a life-drawing class attended only by women in bright Victorian dresses. If such a scene ever took place, it did so, like this exhibition, behind drawn curtains. Here, Cosima zu Knyphausen relays an alternative history of female artistry and intimacy in a series of fine ink drawings and paintings that could be described as cute were they not so nonchalantly ballsy.

  With one hand in her pocket and the other one taking a selfie, the figure in Fit mom sets the tone of the

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  diary April 26, 2018

  Regional Delicacies

  “IT’S THE BIGGEST ARTWORK my mother ever bought,” Sabine Langen-Crasemann told me of the Langen Foundation’s Tadao Ando–designed museum space in a field outside Düsseldorf. Her mother sold a 1951 Jackson Pollock to pay for the elegant glass structure, lined with cherry trees. If the parade of luxuriously stalwart Rimowa suitcases at the airport had not made it abundantly clear, we are not in cheaply uncheerful Berlin anymore. Welcome to the Rhineland: the densest landscape of private museums and collectors in Europe.

  At Museum Ludwig on a Tuesday night, as Haegue Yang received the prestigious

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  film April 10, 2018

  Hiding in Plain Sight

  “THE FEMINIST MOVEMENT WAS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IN MY LIFE,” says Ursula Reuter Christiansen in a new interview that’s included in an exhibition at the National Gallery of Denmark, in Copenhagen. The show revolves around her cult classic short film Skarpretteren (The Executioner), 1971, and features related artworks, along with production and archival material. Reuter Christiansen began studying under Joseph Beuys at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1965, and then left her native Germany in 1970 for a farmhouse on a small Danish island with her husband, the composer Henning Christiansen. “It

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  picks March 12, 2018

  Jonas Lipps

  Going to school means being confronted with a series of possibilities: How might you calculate the slated angle of a roof, review a novel, or paint a picture? Jonas Lipps’s new show of nearly fifty works (mostly untitled and from 2016 to 2018) touches on this theme, not only because many of them directly reference spaces of education but also through their sheer breadth of style. Save for the artist’s remarkably consistent craftsmanship, each piece could be read as the outcome of a different pupil’s absorption of a different lesson; each its own inner world.

  What lines the walls of the gallery

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  interviews February 26, 2018

  Oliver Laric

  Oliver Laric is an Austrian artist based in Berlin. Questioning notions of ownership and originality, he uses 3-D scanning technologies to make historical artworks and other objects available to be copied on his website, threedscans.com. Laric’s own ghostly versions of classical and neoclassical statues were exhibited most recently at the Schinkel Pavilion in Berlin. From March 3 to April 14, 2018, he will show new works in the exhibition “Year of the Dog” at Metro Pictures in New York.

  I AM INTERESTED in moving towards uncertainty. My work offers attempts to reinscribe or open up the material