The architecture of Gerhardsen Gerner is unusual: It is situated in a barrel vault under a commuter-rail bridge. The front window affords a view of the Spree, which flows past at nearly floor level, and visually opens the room and immerses it in shimmering daylight. The sacral austerity of the lines of its arches; the coarse, whitewashed walls; and the flickering river light were well matched by Andrea Winkler’s exhibition “Patricia.” Her delicate, space-structuring works are complex three-dimensional collages, using sculptural elements such as metal chains as well as multicolored decorative

“The back of magic” is what writer Diana Evans calls that area of the theater behind the stage where, as she says, the black hat and the rabbit are stored. In the visual arts, it’s much the same. To peer behind the scenes of a presentation, addressing the techniques or ideology of the display itself, can have a disenchanting effect—can produce unveilings and enlightenment, exposing the tricks by which works of art present themselves and the mechanisms behind their stories. This show by João Penalva was devoted to uncovering this realm, yet hardly appeared intended to do any disenchanting

Under fluorescent light, the mirror foil letters of the words SENSITIVE TO DETERGENT glimmered on a wall in a corner of Autocenter’s one-room exhibition space. Although this banner was similar in appearance to John Knight’s wall text AUTOTYPES, seen in his 2011 show at Greene Naftali in New York, any pursuit of the apparent affiliation between Knight’s work and the recent sculptural production of German- Norwegian artist Yngve Holen leads only to a dead end. The auto parts included in Holen’s exhibition may have been intended to pun on the name of Autocenter, a ten-year-old fixture among Berlin’s