Studio Visit: Marianne Thörmer
The sources of reference for the paintings are manifold. Photographs, originating from Thoermer’s own family albums, extending back to her great grandmother’s, often serve as catching points… Around the studio, copies of photographs are scattered like an incongruous sequence of images. Berlin Art Link.
Curator Interview:
Maria Isserlis
Originally from Kyiv, Ukraine, Maria Isserlis has been based in western Europe for the last 19 years and currently works as a curator, art historian and art producer in Germany. She is both co-founder of A:D:Curatorial in Berlin and curator at SKD Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden. Berlin Art Link.
Martin Wong: Malicious Mischief
In the corners of the brick landscapes of the Lower East Side, a softer form of eroticism is present. In ‘Dottie and Sharp’ (1984), lovers embrace on a burnt out sofa beneath structures of red brick, interrupted only by cracks and plaster or black bricks where windows once were. Wong locates the people—the lover, the anonymous workers—as the true legacy of a place. Berlin Art Link.
Larry Bell: Venice Fog: Recent Investigations
A fixation with glass structures and their interactions with light have dominated Larry Bell’s practice throughout his career. In his latest exhibition, Venice Fog: Recent Investigations, Bell continues his fascination with this material, drawing inspiration from the atmospheric fog of Californian mornings. Read on.
Assembled Spaces
Assembled Spaces brings together the work of Tine Bay Lührssen, Nina Brauhauser and Ilka Helmig in their UK debut. The artist trio combine photography, sculpture and traditional and digital drawing with a considered harmony in the arrangement of the works. They zigzag between each other, creating a visual conversation which dictates no linear instructions, nor a start or end point, to the viewer’s navigation. Read on.
Simon Bayliss: Meditations in an Emergency
Meditations in an Emergency is an exhibition of multitudes, crossing from pottery and electronic music to watercolour landscapes, poetry and performative film. It is a marriage of the seemingly incongruous, such as the neon sign alternating SIMON BAYLISS / SIN ON GAY BLISS reflecting on the glazing of his pottery. A joining, as the words inscribed on the pot reads, of ‘high and low with one another’. Read on.
Malcolm Le Grice: Present Moments and Passing Time
Both a prolific and experimental artist, Malcolm Le Grice has amassed an innovative body of work throughout his career. Now considered a pioneer of British Expanded Cinema, the Plymouth-born artist has explored diverse territory over the years, the results of which have been brought together in this new exhibition. Read on.
Arijit Bhattacharyya: Sea of Forests
To picture a place that is wild is to imagine unchecked growth, an unfurling of sorts—even something hostile and savage. There is no centre to be held; wilderness unfolds in all possible directions. Berlin Art Link.
Berlin Gallery Weekend 2024: Schöneberg Walkabout
Banana boxes are brought out from the invisibility of their ubiquitousness, cast in resin and copper. One blooms oxidised blue, punctuated elsewhere by little strips of medical tape. The work presents a neat union of the processes of healing and erosion, one which breathes a symbiosis into the relationship between these static objects. Berlin Art Link.
Sojourner Truth Parsons: If nobody wants you you’re free
Parsons is deft at playing with the intensity dial of colour. Whereas in parts a softened palette appears more naturalistic, elsewhere hot pinks and bright orange offer tanginess that feels artificial. Berlin Art Link.
Berlin Gallery Weekend 2023: Mitte Walkabout
Gallery Weekend is off to a damp start this year. It’s Friday evening in Mitte and the streetlights are shining off the wet asphalt. One bedraggled tourist power-walks past, sighing to her boyfriend, who is struggling to keep up: “this is not Spring. I want my money back!” To an optimist, it’s only drizzling, really. And there are optimists aplenty on Lindenstraße, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed for a street full of galleries, of which the busiest are likely the ones dishing out free wine. Berlin Art Link.
John Miller: An Elixir of Immortality
The first retrospective of John Miller’s work in Germany, ‘An Elixir of Immortality’ provides a comprehensive overview spanning from the 1980s to the present. Exhibited at Schinkel Pavillon is a divergent and at times incongruous body of work, including sculpture, video and painting. Miller refuses to be pigeonholed or swiftly pinned down, punctuating his work with a beat of wry humour along the way. Read on.
The Garden of Earthly Delights
Taking its point of departure and title from Hieronymus Bosch’s ‘Garden of Earthly Delights’ (1490-1510), the current exhibition at Gropius Bau brings together the wide-ranging work of twenty international artists. The garden state serves as a microcosmic starting point, from which expansive ideas and wider dialogues emerge about colonialism, systems of sharing, borders and structures of thought. Read on.
Schering Stiftung 2018: Anna Daučíková
The current exhibition at KW Institute presents the work of Anna Daučíková through video, photography and sculpture. Spanning the past five decades, the body of work refuses linearity, welcomes the experimental possibilities between the artist and her materials, and opens up to wider discourses on identity. Read on.
Artist Interview: Jumana Manna
Jumana Manna is a Palestinian visual artist and filmmaker based between Jerusalem and Berlin. Her recent work includes the feature-length films ‘Wild Relatives’ (2018) and ‘Foragers’ (2022). Berlin Art Link.
Studio Visit: Jenna Sutela
The works follow the deep line through Sutela’s work, which turns away from the anthropocentric. It leans instead into the possibilities that, say, the patterns of vibrating water or the charge of compost can reveal to us. At the crossroads of living and computational systems exist expansive ways of seeing, receiving and communicating. Berlin Art Link.
Rose Wylie: History Paintings
It seems near impossible to refer to the style of a Rose Wylie painting without mentioning the word childlike. Even on canvas, brush-strokes and mixes of paint still carry the instinctive childlike motion of the impulsive hand that struck them there. Bold colours form a wide range of wilful distortions among the eclectic compendium of characters inhabiting Wylie’s visual world. Read on.
Atlantic Project: After the Future
Over the course of three weeks, a variety of unusual sites throughout Plymouth have been transformed into exhibition spaces, from pedestrianised streets and dilapidated buildings to shop-front windows, as part of The Atlantic Project: After The Future, a pilot biennial for the South West region. Read on.
Christopher Kulendran Thomas: Ground Zero
As virtual worlds become increasingly ubiquitous and algorithmic, we have never been more connected yet dislocated. Our networks are continually subject to change and, as globalisation accelerates, so are the intrinsic structures of identity, nation and power. The artist Christopher Kulendran Thomas investigates these shifting structures in relation to one another in his latest exhibition ‘Ground Zero’. Read on.
Ben Johnson: Spirit of Place
Time after time, painting has been declared dead. Matches have been taken to its name, the obituary written and ashes scattered. Upon every single occasion, however, painting rises with defiance and proves its relevance again and again. The ability to do so relies upon the innovation with which artists continue to approach the medium. Among such artists is Ben Johnson, whose first retrospective show, ‘Spirit of Place’, proves that painting has lost none of its magic in captivating the viewer. Read on.
Material Nuclear Culture
Ever since their invention, submarines have been a source of unextinguished curiosity. Silently present in the depths of the sea, they are in equal parts insidious and menacing as they are intriguing and mysterious. Read on.
Dan Holdsworth: Spatial Objects
As with most of Holdsworth’s work, it is not simply a case of moving from one image to the next with a small nod or murmur of appreciation. ‘Spatial Objects’ presents a challenge to its viewer, a space within which the audience must think and observe deeply. Read on.