Canadian Art International: A letter from Mitte
Berlin, Germany
Berlin is not the international art city it's made out to be. It's insular, navel-gazing and chock full of attitude. This, at least, is what Ulrike Kremeier, director of the non-profit space Plattform, has to say. Her largest qualm with the city is that, in her view, it lacks the international dialogue that it boasts it has. Kremeier's own space, in the Mitte district, has been in operation for eight years. In that time, on a modest budget, Kremeier has invited international artists and installed various projects that aim to "distribute and receive artistic and cultural praxis." These projects, smaller in scale and more specialized in reception, continue to run counter to the mass of slick galleries and rising art stars that dominate Berlin's art world.
One of these new stars is the ubiquitous German painter Daniel Richter. His paintings were recently exhibited at the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein and after a glowing profile by Diederich Diederichsen in Modern Painters, he has an onslaught of upcoming shows, including at The Power Plant in Toronto in spring 2004. Richter continually draws upon innumerable representational sources and the associations these bring to him when making his pictures. The result is something that hovers between absurdity, ugliness, painterliness, abstraction and an uncanny beauty. His pictures are dazzling but also unsettling, and shift between a place of fear and unrecognizability.
Oddly, though, there is an order to Richter's harrowing, disruptive vision, despite its brashness. There is often, for example, a stable figure-ground relationship alongside the confusion and ephemerality of his figures. The skyline or horizon, if it appears, is also a stabilizing field in the picture. The same can be said for the architectural forms in his paintings, which emit the unexpected sense of structure that is integral to his work. In all, it is not a surprise that his work has met such incredible reception. Richter is likely the best painter of his city's generation.
Other painters on the rise, and there are several of them in Berlin, include Thomas Scheibitz and Anton Henning. The work of either artist may be found throughout the Berlin gallery circuit, whether in Mitte or in the notorious Holzmarktstrasse or Zimmerstrasse areas (the upscale Galerie Max Hetzler, which shows artists ranging from Liam Gillick to Glenn Brown, Ellen Gallagher and Albert Oehlen, is in both locations).
This past summer Henning's paintings could be found concurrently at Galerie Arndt & Partner and at Galerie Wohnmaschine. His work is witty and incredibly versatile, and maintains a curious, whimsical relationship with figuration. His paintings are stuffed with effervescence and nostalgia and have a feeling of being deliberately crafted as "off" or, as with much contemporary German painting, as "wrong," and yet remain compelling and beautiful. Thomas Scheibitz's work, more of a flattened, colour-tone fusion of landscape painting implicating architectural and grid-like structures, shares a sense of playfulness with Henning's work, but leans towards abstraction more consistently.
Otherwise, the sprawl of Berlin galleries and their artists' work seems endless. But within all this, in the very heart of the city, above a McDonald's at Alexanderplatz, sits the tiny project gallery FUTURE7. Run by two art enthusiasts with philosophy and art history backgrounds, Nikolai von Rosen and Florian Wojnar, FUTURE7 operates in complete contrast to the majority of art spaces in that its directors not only exhibit emerging Berlin artists, they collect the very work they exhibit. Nothing is for sale, only for viewing. In a tightly organized storage area, von Rosen and Wojnar keep the works they have collected since 2000. The work varies from the clever and surreal digitally-altered photography of Beate Gütschow, to the obsessively crafted sculpture vessels of Isa Melsheimer, to the carefully staged photographs of Prinz Gholam, a gay couple who recreate motifs from the history of art.
In addition to their collecting and exhibition activities, FUTURE7 produce their own work, including one issue of a large-format quarterly magazine called Diamondpaper. This magazine is another element of their unspoken mandate to bring together Berlin-based artists of their generation, all of whose work has merit, all within a small window of particularity inside the massive Berlin art scene.
In all, there may be no means to determine whether or not Berlin actually needs to relinquish what's been described as its insularity. The city is a world unto itself. Its own history and Zeitgeist are fuelling an abundance of activity. Although much of this deserves to be ignored, and some of it does need to become more internationally involved, a great deal of it carries the clarity and vision that have probably established the idea of Berlin as the next great art city.
Winter 2003
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