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| Little O and I at Blain Southern. Photo: Akane Kimbara |
What does art do? A lot of times when looking at art in galleries, it doesn't do much to me. I can acknowledge its statement, its message, its price, its "importance," etc. but that's about it. So it was exceptionally last Saturday when I was gallery hopping that I felt thrilled a few times. To be "excited in breath and heart", as 19th art critic Vernon Lee wrote in her Gallery Diaries, is a very pleasurable experience. To experience increased pleasure in times when art is supposed to teach you a lesson and be useful, seems almost wrong. But my friend W. told me it's because good art opens up something inside.
I started at Asta Gröting's show in Carlier Gebauer. I know her work quite well and it's always executed to perfection. One common characteristic of Asta's work is that she brings the inside to the outside - like the bullet holes in WWII-facades, or, and this was my favourite, the digestive organs from... - it didn't say from what but I like to think from something big like a whale.
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| Asta Gröting at Carlier Gebauer |
New to me was the next stop at Blain Southern: big Indeterminate Line Sculptures by the French artist Bernar Venet, exhibited in the huge hall. It was a pleasure for the eye. To twist the material of steel like this, to play around with it and to make it almost frivolously curl seemed quite an optimistic act to me. Upstairs were beautiful drawings and Continuous Curves sculptures, curving their way through square space. There was something lived through about these sculptures, something that most art lacks because it's only the result of a quick top of the head idea. Like the gimmicky art of Ryan Gander at Esther Schipper. Ryan Gander has gotten too slick, probably under the pressure of a well-oiled machine like Esther Schipper. But then, nothing really can look good in that space. The downstairs clothing store manages to look better.
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| Bernar Venet at Blain Southern |
My favourite gallery in town is Plan B. It has been featuring great shows lately, always beautifully curated and accompanied with a nice booklet. Often also discoveries, at least for me. Horia Damian is now on show with the utopian galaxies that he drew, painted, and sometimes also realised as sculptures. My favourite was a painting of a sculpture he wanted to install at San Francisco Art Institute. It was intended to conserve the sunlight. SFAI could have used that now its reputation is downhill.
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| At Plan B with my favourite painting on the back wall |
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| Little O and I at Barbara Thumm. Photo: Akane Kimbara |
I then realised, in the middle of Potsdamer Straße, that I had missed out on Fiona Banner's exhibition at Galerie Barbara Thumm, next to Carlier Gebauer. So I went all the way back and it was worth it. Inflatable sculptures might be the thing to do lately but Fiona Banner's inflatable full stops were just great. The big black dots were not drifting in the space but motionless exerting their weight. On the walls were small paintings and copies of etchings depicting the British Chanel. After all the Brexit talk, one couldn't imagine an artist doing something playful about it, plus using fantasy, but Fiona Banner does.
PS: I also checked out the small salon table sculptures of Jorinde Voigt at Klosterfelde, of course in the color gold. Again, I had the impression I could make a great set of earrings out of Voigt's work. I went by Tanja Wagner but it wasn't my thing. And at Tanya Leighton I didn't even go inside after glancing through the windows. And oh ja, almost forgot about König. The video piece by Camille Henrot is okay, and I'm not into the Leizpiger painting stuff from Matthias Weischer.