The Schinkel Pavillion is a large octagonal room, built in 1969 in the former East Berlin in a mixture of ornate classicism and Bauhaus-style modernism. In the past few years, it has hosted a series of exhibitions of contemporary sculpture. Its grandeur and specificity––high windows, wrought-iron railings and marble floors––make it a difficult space for art to inhabit: Art is always competing (at a disadvantage) with the dominance of the architecture.

Dirk Bell brings to the occasion both an instinct for the dramatic gesture and a necessary passivity. He is primarily known as a painter who references the dissolute genre of late-nineteenth-century Symbolism to blend it with the Pop symbolism of late-twentieth-century graphic illustration. Here, however, he defers to the overaestheticized pretensions of the interior with neutral industrial materials. In the pavilion itself, a geometric structure of white neon tubes has been installed below the original ceiling: a large square comprising thirty-two triangles with two tubes extending from each side so it resembles a star that fits flush within the room’s octagon. The tubes are connected to a computer that turns them on and off, although the changes are so gradual, and follow a system so impossible to discern, that you might not notice. The general concentration of light remains more or less constant. This bright overhead complexity recalls Liam Gillick’s Plexiglas ceilings––which provide a privileged space for discussion and reflection––but Bell’s irregular sequencing of light brings to the strictness of formalistic abstraction an anarchistic quality. It might be a parody of early Conceptual sculpture, recalling Sol LeWitt’s injunction to pursue an “irrational” train of thought “absolutely and logically.”

Bell has erected steel bars spanning the width of the adjoining room, which spell out, in sequence, FREE. Contradicting this, the bars hinder passage through the room, just as the lowered ceiling of neon seems as though it were about to trap you in its buzzing web.

— Mark Prince