Gallery Weekend Berlin 2019 A Quick Guide

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Gallery Weekend Berlin is a one-stop city-break for contemporary art in Germany. It attracts art enthusiasts and collectors from all over the world. For three days over 50 galleries throughout Berlin open their doors to the public to celebrate the new and emerging as well as the established. Beside well-known galleries many new and experimental working galleries participate in the event. The exhibiting artists are curated to show what’s new and trending in contemporary art.

This year, Gallery Weekend Berlin celebrates its 15th edition this year.

The event officially takes place in more than 40 galleries across the city, showcasing work by both new and established artists from April 26th to 28th. Additionally, a host of institutions, private collections, galleries and off-spaces will be opening new exhibitions throughout the week.

Berlin has a new publicly accessible private collection—this time one that focuses specifically on contemporary time-based art. Removed from the city center, unlike the Boros Collection or Sammlung Hoffmann, Fluentum finds its home in a former military facility that served as the headquarters of the US Army from 1945–94 in the quiet south-west neighborhood of Dahlem. The space is opening its doors for the first time during Gallery Weekend with a solo exhibition of the Dutch artist Guido van der Werve, though the collection itself was founded in 2010 and also boasts works by Omer Fast, Hito Steyerl, William Kentridge, Douglas Gordon, Katarina Zdjelar and Hiwa K, among others.

Following its inauguration at Fondazione Prada in Milan, the exhibition ‘The Black Image Corporation,’ conceived by acclaimed artist Theaster Gates, will now be presented at Gropius Bau. Through the work of photographers Moneta Sleet Jr. and Isaac Sutton, the show explores the fundamental legacy of the Johnson Publishing Company archives, which include more than four million images that have helped shape the aesthetic and cultural languages of the contemporary African-American identity. The John Publishing Company, for example, helmed the production and distribution of the monthly magazine Ebony as well as its weekly sister, Jet. By covering everything from events like the March on Washington in 1963 to celebrities and the first African-American astronaut, these publications, founded in 1945 and 1951 respectively, developed lasting legacies as two of the most important titles that not only represented, but also celebrated and discussed black culture. ‘Black Image Corporation’ illuminates the richness of African-American professional codes, modes of dress, social structures, domestic lives, and forms of beauty and glamour.

André Hemer "Illuminations 7" (Vienna 2019, 03-04.13:37 CET)
André Hemer “Illuminations 7” (Vienna 2019, 03-04.13:37 CET)

Sinta Tantra and André Hemer. For their first ever joint exhibition at Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery Berlin, the artists present distinct works that explore the fluctuating relationships between space, time and materiality. Aptly titled ‘Woven and Illuminated’, the exhibition brings together a collection of artworks that weave through dimensions, taking the viewer on an intimate voyage into the artistic process.

American artist Adam Pendleton merges references ranging from Dadism to the Black Arts Movement to create works across various media, including painting, performance, video and writing. ‘Who We Are,’ which will unfold at both of Galerie Max Hetzler’s locations, will no doubt continue the artist’s exploration of issues inherent to modes of representation, specifically when confronting notions of “race” and “blackness.” He uses his practice as a way to look into the past as a way to “imagine alternate presents.”

Although much of the energy surrounding Gallery Weekend is focused on, well, galleries alongside private collections and institutional shows, this art fair has chosen to avoid the autumn frenzy. In the atrium of the Deutsche Telekom Hauptstadtrepraesentanz, near Gendarmenmarkt, Paper Positions features nearly 50 galleries from Germany and beyond who present works on paper—or some variation thereof. One such space is Wiesbaden’s DavisKlemmGallery, who will show the artist Petra Scheibe Teptliz, whose work you can learn about here.

HAU is home to yet another highlight of the week: the German premiere of the performance/exhibition ‘Les Louvres and/or Kicking the Dead’ by Walid Raad, whose artistic practice revolves around the relationship between culture and violence. Born in Chbanieh, Lebanon, and currently living in New York City, Raad will recount the genesis of the works on display at HAU, particularly the quest that took him from a WWII museum in Belgium to the Louvre Abu Dhabi. Alternating between documentary and fiction, the plot develops until two mysteries are resolved—the first one concerning five objects sent to the Louvre AD, and the second concerning a strangely ill-fated collection.

‘Archivos Olvidados’ marks Sol Calero’s inaugural exhibition at ChertLüdde. Constructed as a tribute to her late grandmother, Luisa Hernandez, the project acknowledges the entwinement of art and craftsmanship to the family matriarch, and celebrates the significance of each to the social and familial structures of Calero’s childhood. The central subject matter is an archive of magazine clippings, formerly used by Hernandez as references for her paintings, and elaborated on here by her granddaughter.

For her fifth solo exhibition at carlier | gebauer, Astra Gröting addresses questions of vulnerability, injury, and repression through three new series, as well as selected earlier works. The pieces in the exhibition evince an expanded understanding of the body, something she has previously explored through her manifold artistic practices, which she has developed since the mid-1980s. The artist translates sculptural thought in diverse media, often inverting the traditional notions associated with monumental sculpture to draw the viewer’s attention to the absence and physical and emotional rifts between people and things.

‘Brine’ marks Elizabeth Jaeger‘s solo debut in Berlin. Through sculpture and installation, the artist, who is based in New York and has exhibited at institutions such as The Whitney Museum of American Art and MoMA PS1, reframes the familiar association between the viewer with their own physical presence and consciousness. In this show, she’ll present “Empty, rotting, hollow…”, a series of transparent glass fish dangling upside down from steel structures, their copper teeth exposed. With gravel covering the gallery’s floor, viewers will perhaps be transported to the interior of a fish processing facility—all in all, a metaphor of “hollow remains of a society in silent, unrelenting paralysis.”

Following numerous solo institutional exhibitions, most recently at Kunsthalle Basel and Haus der Kunst, this exhibition is Raphaela Vogel’s return to BQ after her first show with the gallery three years ago. In the three rooms, Vogel will combine sound collage, sculpture, video and painting into what she deems a “surreal odyssey that descends into the dark sides of the career dream.” Through visuals that include a whirling vortex of an ocean, a bird spider (the largest spider, by mass and size, on the planet) and a cantilever chair, the works reflect both the artist’s own phobias as well as those of the art world at large: the loss of self, the state of exhaustion in an endless production cycle, and social expectations about what it means to be a female artist.

Information provided by Berlin Art Link

Other Galleries

Galerie Guido W. Baudach, Björm Dahlem / Blain I Southern, Bemar Venet / Niels Borch Jensen Galerie, Matt Saunders / Isabella Bortolozzi Galerie, Veit Laurent Kurz  / BQ, Raphaela Vogel / Galerie Buchholz, Michael Krebber / Buchmann Galerie, Nigel Cooke  / Capitain Petzel, Stefanie Heinze / carlier I gebauer, Asta Gröting / Crone Berlin, Clemens Krauss / Contemporary Fine Arts, Tal R, Eberhard Havekost  / ChertLüdde, Sol Calero, Juan Antonio Olivares / Dittrich & Schlechtriem, Julian Charriére  / Galerie Eigen+Art, Martin Eder; !Mediengruppe Bitnik / Konrad Fischer Galerie, Richard Long / Galerie Friese, William N. Copley, Saul Steinberg / Galerie Michael Haas, Abraham David Christian /  Kewenig, Imi Knoebel / Kicken Berlin, Robert Frank, Saul Leiter / Klemm´s, Elizabeth Jaeger / Klosterfelde Edition, Jorinde Voigt / König Galerie, Camille Henrot, Matthias Weischer, Jeppe Hein / KOW, Franz Erhard Walther, Clegg & Guttmann / Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Pieter Schoolwerth / Tanya Leighton, Math Bass / alexander levy, Fabian Knecht / Daniel Marzona, Axel Hütte / Meyer Riegger, Daniel Knorr / Michel Majerus Estate, Michel Majerus, Andy Warhol, Christopher Wool / Galerie Neu, Jana Euler / neugerriemschneider, Thomas Bayrle / Galerie Nordenhake, Rémy Zaugg / Peres Projects, Beth Letain / Galeria Plan B, Horia Damian / Gregor Podnar, Anne Neukamp / PSM, Daniel Lergon / Aurel Scheibler, Ernst Wilhelm Nay / Esther Schipper, Ryan Gander / Galerie Thomas Schulte, Jonathan Lasker, Alice Aycock / Société, Kaspar Müller / Sprüth Magers, Peter Fischli/David Weiss, Reinhard Mucha, Andrea Robbins/Max Becher / Galerie Barbara Thumm, Anne-Mie van Kerckhoven, Fiona Banner / Galerie Barbara Weiss, Frieda Toranzo Jaeger / Wentrup, Florian Meisenberg, David Renggli / Barbara Wien, Jong-Ik Kim / Kunsthandel Wolfgang Werner, Richard Oelze

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