Since opening its doors in October 2008, the Temporäre Kunsthalle Berlin has exhibited the work of contemporary artists residing in Berlin within a very basic white-cube construction, while just to its left, the Palast der Republik—former home to the East German parliament but also a center of East German social life with its restaurants, theaters, and galleries—has undergone the last stage of a highly controversial demolition. In its place will be a replica of the Berliner Stadtschloss, the Baroque Prussian palace originally located on this site before it, too, was torn down by the East German

The beauty of mathematics is not something one often considers when walking through Berlin’s galleries. Attila Csörgö’s show “Magnet Spring” was an exception. The Hungarian artist, born in 1965, visualizes physical forces in settings resembling experiments, making their complex nature graspable in a simple but not simplistic way. In 2007, he showed a groundbreaking piece that crystallizes his approach to the mathematic arts: Untitled (1 tetrahedron + 1 cube + 1 octahedron = 1 dodecahedron), 2000. On a metal rack one can see a cube, a pyramid, and a double pyramid made of thin wooden sticks. Then

There are some exhibitions that at first glance seem exciting and completely convincing—but then somehow leave you feeling perplexed. The young Dutch artist Vincent Vulsma’s recent show in Berlin was one such puzzle. Vulsma does everything right: He compellingly executes intelligent ideas. Yet ultimately it’s hard to know what to do with them.

Hanging in the gallery were eight almost identical, glistening, jet-black—well, what are they? Canvases, paintings, objects? Hybridity characterizes this art from the word go. On the one hand, all eight works start with a standardized, prefabricated, and