“Neolithic Porns”

Featuring as it does Delacroix, Linder, Henrik Olesen, and Paul Thek, rather than artists from the gallery’s stable, the exhibition inaugurating Isabella Bortolozzi’s new space (an Alt-Berliner apartment near the Neue Nationalgalerie that, according to Bortolozzi, used to belong to actor Hans Albers) sounded strange but seductive—an impression made only stronger by the show’s title. Greeted by what the press release calls “hard-core sentimental songs” by Italian chanteuse Mina, visitors enter through a hallway into a wood-paneled room in which a gold-framed eighteenth-century painting depicting a nude couple in an explicitly erotic pose features prominently. The work was once owned by Bortolozzi’s deceased father, who apparently attributed it to Delacroix and kept it hidden from his children in a locked chamber. Across from the canvas, atop a flat file, sits Olesen’s Variations 1/24, 2007, a collage of Internet images depicting male abdomens and the bulges of manhood under too-tight pants. On leaving the room, one encounters Neolithic Porno, 1979–80, a small painting by Thek, which lends the show its title. A stylized depiction of an organic form resembling female sex organs, the work is equipped with a small lamp, which further highlights its precious status. The following rooms are given over to British underground artist Linder and feature her digital montages (female pinups and gay porn coyly superimposed with exotic flowers) and a surrealist object made from a pair of pumps, (female) hair, and a (male) tie. In this hide-and-seek game about privacy, intimacy, seduction, gender, pornography, and, ultimately, truth, the works exult perfectly in the space, in its semiprivate atmosphere, its stories, and its secret areas, one of which, Bortolozzi claims, was a hideout for Jews during the Nazi regime. It is unclear, however, just where the truth here ends; the press release, which takes the form of a Delphic love poem, does, after all, end with the dealer confessing that she has told “a little white lie.”