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Art Forum Berlin at the Berlin Messe
Visitors at Art Forum Berlin, 2004
Entrance to Art Forum Berlin, with Peter Rösel’s untitled rainbow gate, at Wohnmaschine
Angus Fairhurst
I’m sorry and I won’t do it again
2004
Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin
Denim paintings by Mike Bouchet at Galerie Michael Neff, Frankfurt
Carsten Holler’s Sphere and Ugo Rondinone’s The Dancer and the Dance at Schipper & Krome, Berlin
Thomas Hirschhorn’s North Pole (right) and Anton Henning’s Blumenstilleben No. 193, both 2004, at Arndt + Partner, Berlin
Neo Rauch
Diktat
2004
Eigen + Art, Leipzig/Berlin
Seo
Green Hill and the Big Sea
2004
Galerie Michael Schultz, Berlin
Michael Schultz
Bernhard Martin
Movie
2004
Thaddeaus Ropac
Manfred Pernice
Hassliche Luise
2004
"Made in Berlin"
Installation by Jonathan Meese in "Made in Berlin"
Markus Selg
The Founder
2004
"Made in Berlin"
Hans-Jörg Mayer
Reigen
2003
"Made in Berlin"
Aura Rosenberg’s Angel of History in "Made in Berlin"
Chris Johanson
Don’t Listen to Me
2004
Kavi Gupta, Chicago
A drawing by Ashley Macomber at Kavi Gupta, Chicago
Heimo Zobernig
o.T.
2004
Johann Widauer, Innsbruck
Sculpture by Joel Morrison at Finesilver Gallery, San Antonio
Attila Csörgö
Inner Spaces I-V
1995-2000
Galerija Gregor Podnar, Ljubljana
Painting by Alice Stepanek and Steven Maslin at Galerie Volker Diehl
Still from Felix Gmelin’s DVD at Milliken, Stockholm
Still from Yves Netzhammer’s Sweet Wind in Your Face (2004) at Galerie Anita Becker, Frankfurt
Sophie Calle, "True Stories," installation view at Arndt & Partner
The poster for Sophie Calle’s "Did You See Me?" exhibition at the Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin
"Leider" by Martin Assig, at Galerie Volker Diehl
Sarah Morris at Galerie Max Hetzler
Antony Gormley’s Clearing (2003) at Galerie Nordenhake
Installation view of "The Stars. . . " at Schipper & Krome
Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, still from Road Trip (2004) at Galerie Barbara Weiss
George Bures Miller and Janet Cardiff
Cecily Brown at Contemporary Fine Arts
Fireworks over the Neue Nationalgalerie on Sept. 19, 2004
Friedrich Christian Flick tours his collection with the press in tow, Sept. 21, 2004
The Hamburger Bahnhof’s new Flick annex, exterior view
Bruce Nauman’s Five Marching Men (1985), in the Flick Collection
Paul McCarthy’s Saloon Theater (1995-99), installation view
Duane Hanson’s Motorcycle Accident (1967), in the Flick Collection
Blue Skies over Berlin
by Walter Robinson
Berlin’s economic woes -- unemployment in this city of 3.4 million people approaches 20 percent -- haven’t made a dent in its well-deserved reputation as a world art center. "We are doing better than ever!" proclaimed Sabrina van der Lay, creative director of the ninth Art Forum Berlin art fair, Sept. 18-22, 2004. "Maybe because of simple creative defiance."
Berlin certainly has become a favorite city for young artists and progressive contemporary art dealers, and this last week they have been joined by 119 galleries from 20 countries, who have set up their booths -- displaying works by an estimated 1,300 artists -- in a symmetrical pair of halls at the Berlin Messe fairgrounds.
Participants in Art Forum Berlin range from Thaddaeus Ropac (Salzburg/Paris), Eigen + Art (Leipzig/Berlin) and Georg Kargl (Vienna) to Milliken (Stockholm), IBIDProjects (London/Vilnius) and Kavi Gupta Gallery (Chicago). The fair boasts 10 galleries from the Nordic countries, which are just a hop away from this northern German city, and eight galleries from the states, including I-20, Roebling Hall and Pierogi from New York.
Almost 40 of the fair’s galleries hail from Berlin itself, including Arndt & Partner, Contemporary Fine Arts, Galerie Volker Diehl, Galerie Haas & Fuchs, Martin Klosterfelde, Galerie Neu, Galerie Nordenhake, Alexander Ochs Galleries, Schipper & Krome, Galerie Michael Schultz, Galerie Barbara Weiss and Wohnmaschine. According to the fair administration, over 19,000 visitors had attended Art Forum Berlin in its first three days.
"The atmosphere is great," said Berlin dealer Volker Diehl, referring to the general mood, the nice fall weather and the airy hall itself, with its clerestory windows, which dates from the fascist era. "Sales are at least okay, maybe better," he said, cautiously. Diehl was managing director of Art Forum Berlin when it began in 1995, back when it was the very first contemporary fair, well before Frieze in London and before the Armory Show in New York. As everyone knows, Art Forum Berlin had several rough years before many Berlin dealers signed up anew in a spirit of hometown boosterism.
Art Forum Berlin has "much energy and many collectors," said Helmut Schuster of Galerie Schuster in Frankfurt. "This is the best year of the fair, definitely, with Americans, the British, collectors from Paris, Brussels -- though not too many from Berlin." The German capital still has not developed its own collector base.
Nevertheless, Schuster is optimistic. "Artists will lead the economy," he said. "Berlin is like New York was, 15 years ago." One thing is true -- rents are low, compared to New York and London. Schuster has big plans for a substantial real estate development on the Spree River in southeastern Berlin; though details are not yet complete, he hopes to eventually create a complex to house two museum branches, two private foundations and several galleries.
The fair is dotted with showpieces and eye-catching installations. At one entrance, visitors are welcomed by a large, rainbow-colored arch, ironically constructed with picket-fence material (that German gardeners use to keep out rabbits) by Frankfurt artist Peter Rösel at the booth of the Berlin gallery Wohnmaschine (price: €20,000).
Greeting visitors to the booth of Contemporary Fine Arts is a life-size silver bronze sculpture by Angus Fairhurst of an orangutan -- which is lifting its head from its shoulders! The title: I’m sorry and I won’t do it again. The price: £70,000, in an edition of three. Leaning against the wall at Galerie Michael Neff from Frankfurt are several large paintings made of stretched denim by 30-something Mike Bouchet, who has his own "Carpe Denim" jeans company. They’re €4,000 each (the paintings, not the jeans).
The scene is silvery and space-age at Schipper & Krome, where Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone has framed the booth with a kind of oversized Sol LeWitt grid of brushed steel, though it is fitted with minispeakers (playing the sound of breathing) and dotted with small comic drawings of a raven man. Titled The Dancer and the Dance, the work is CHF 155,000, and looks good next to Carsten Holler’s Sphere, a play structure of smoky acrylic that is lined with ball bearings so that a person on a circular sled can slide about inside. Sphere is €90,000.
And the Arndt & Partner booth is filled with an imposing and rather ominous sculpture by Thomas Hirschhorn of the North Pole (2004), featuring a frozen papier-mâché landscape dripping with painted blood and topped with a crucifix wrapped in real chains. As is frequently the case with Hirschhorn, the work is sadly topical.
How is business? Needless to say, works by artists who are generally in demand are certain to be snapped up here, or at any art fair, for that matter. Such is certainly the case with the "yGa" craze, the recent market frenzy for the New Wave of German figurative painters.
First in this regard is dealer Harry Lybke of Eigen + Art, who quickly sold a large painting by Neo Rauch that depicts several people reading books under the watchful eye of a kind of minotaur. The price: €170,000 (Rauch makes 15 to 20 paintings a year, the gallery says). Also sold are a dramatic architectural painting by the 32-year-old Leipzig artist David Schnell of a vaulted redwood plank structure with blue sky showing through the cracks for €17,000; and an evocative portrait of a sad young woman by Martin Eder for €7,000. Eder has quite the masterful touch, and recently made a series of succulently sweet watercolors of kittens and erotic nudes, all of which were snapped up for €1,200 each.
"The market likes German painting," said Berlin dealer Michael Schultz, with simple directness. "It’s the new romantic style." His booth is filled with large figurative paintings marked with red dots: a light-suffused painting of athletes by Norbert Bisky, including a gargantuan figure that may be based on Goya’s picture of Saturn devouring his children (€18,000); a candy-colored mountain landscape by the 30-something artist Kristina Girke, a student of Katharina Grosse (€5,400); and a collage-painting of a couple on a raft done by the 22-year-old Korea-born Berlin artist Seo, a student of Georg Baselitz (€9,100).
"It was the first painting I sold at the fair," Schultz said of Seo’s work -- "two days before the opening." The dealer does a lot of fairs -- he expects to participate in FIAC, Art Cologne and Art Basel Miami Beach this year -- and does about 60 percent of his business at them. "Every year we do a bit more!" he said. Schultz even sold a painting by that art-fair fixture, the androgynous, vinyl-clothed performance duo Eva and Adele. Needless to say, the painting is a somewhat garish self-portrait.
"Everything is selling," said the aforementioned Frankfurt dealer Helmut Schuster, indicating an oversized painting of a pensive woman by Sabine Dehnel and a blurry corridor based on a scene from The Shining by Irish artist Eamon O’Kane (the prices are €5,400 and €6,500, respectively). Dehnel, as Schuster wryly pointed out, "lives in Berlin now, like nearly every German artist."
Thaddaeus Ropac filled his booth with works by Bernhard Martin, a lively figurative painter whose eclectic canvases mix expressionistic and decorative abstract sections with Photo Realist elements -- and a touch of eroticism. The 30-something Frankfurt native, now resident in Berlin for two years, is very busy, with a big show slated for the Villa Arson in Nice in early 2005 and a catalogue due out from Hatje Cantz. A large painting sells for about €35,000, if you can get one. The suite of small drawings in the booth was snapped up for the Museum of Modern Art (putative MoMA drawings patron André Schlectriem was at the fair, after all -- see "Artnet News," Sept. 21, 2004).
Before continuing with the wares at the Berlin Art Forum bazaar, however, let’s take a side trip to the accompanying exhibition, "Made in Berlin." In an effort to add some extra zip, the art fair organizers called on Zdenek Felix, former director of the Deichtorhallen Hamburg, to curate a survey of works by 42 local artists (admittedly from lists suggested by galleries participating in Art Forum Berlin) and install it in an adjacent, 1,100-square-meter hall.
The show, which features a good deal of figurative painting, is being well received, but to this viewer at least it outlines a widespread Berlin esthetic that is rather distressing -- an obsession with ruins and rubble, 60 years after World War II and almost 15 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and a dark, angry approach to figure painting that is antisocial and even a little deranged. For the Berlin artist, this show seems to say, the world is in chaos and populated by monsters.
Thus, Manfred Pernice’s rough concrete bunker (he used to make such nicely carpentered sculpture), large color photos of dilapidated buildings by Ryuiji Miyamoto and paintings, many paintings, of ugliness -- bug-eyed monsters from André Butzer, gothic forests by Valérie Favre, dystopic cityscapes by Michael Kunze and an especially sadistic daisy-chain drawing by Ralf Ziervogel. An installation by Jonathan Meese -- paintings, bronze busts (purporting to depict Nietzsche and the artist’s mother, among others) and a discombobulated text painted in yellow on torn butcher paper stuck to the wall -- is ranting paranoid schizophrenia in corporeal form.
The large collage of two battling figures by Markus Selg, which seems to channel Brad Pitt’s Trojan War through a South Seas package tour, is inventive enough that it’s not completely depressing. And the paintings by Hans-Jörg Mayer, which often combine imagery from Old Masters with portraits of pop models and movie stars, have an intensity and artistry that is hard to resist (his pictures, represented by Galerie Christian Nagel, are about €12,000 each).
Even the mural-sized, digitally influenced painting of an airport or factory by Corinne Wasmuht, a good painter, looks like it was made by scraping and chipping layers and flakes of old paint from a wall. A few atypically bright works, like the otherwise mundane collage of cheerful, high-key clips from television by Daniel Pflumm or the optimistic photographs of young "angels of history" by Aura Rosenberg (though they hover over wrecked cityscapes, again), serve to underline how different the artistic culture is here in New York.
Turnabout is fair play -- upon reading these remarks, the journalist and critic Barbara Weidle, a contributor to Artnet Magazine, was quick to point out that art in New York seems obsessed with sex, no doubt a reaction to America's "puritan" culture.
But back to the fair -- it’s an easy enough passage from one to the other! Not all the sales belong to the new German romanticism. Chicago dealer Kavi Gupta was even more upbeat than usual, if that is possible. "My crates got stuck in customs, but as soon as I put the work up in the booth, it sold immediately. It was like a feeding frenzy," he said, especially for works from "Beautiful Loser," the show of San Francisco street culture organized by Aaron Rose and Christian Strike that’s now at the Yerba Buena Cultural Center in San Francisco.
Among the wares at his booth -- most now sold -- are a charming Chris Johanson drawing of a multihued, faceted abstract sculpture that says, in a word balloon, "don’t listen to me, for my modern ways are not the answer at all" (€3,000); beautifully rendered drawings of animals by Ashley Macomber from Chicago (€1,600); acrylic and oil paintings of modernist structures in decay by Angela Gualdoni ($5,000-$6,000); and a color photo by Melanie Schiff of a pair of breasts with raspberries on the nipples (€850)
Look at the time! Would you mind if we picked up the pace a bit? At Galerie Johann Widauer from Innsbruck is a great untitled sculpture by a favorite, Heimo Zobernig -- a multi-legged star shape made of cardboard tubes painted in black enamel (€4,000). At the booth of Finesilver Gallery from San Antonio are pseudo-biomorphic sculptures by 27-year-old Joel Morrison that are actually odds-and-ends wrapped up and cast in brightly colored plastic. They’re delicious, in a synthetic sort of way, at $12,000-$15,000.
At Galerija Gregor Podnar from Ljubljana, one of two contemporary art galleries in the city, are a series of black-and-white photographs by Attila Csörgö documenting the cast of the inner spaces of a piece of Swiss cheese. "It’s the materialization of the immaterial," said Podnar with a straight face. The photos are €2,600, in an edition of 10.
At Volker Diehl are two paintings that inspired the title of this report, realist oils on linen by Alice Stepanek and Steven Maslin, a pair of painters from Cologne and Berlin. They specialize in images that are all blue skies, fluffy clouds and flowers in the air -- a small crack of daylight in an expanse of gloom (priced at €4,500 and €7,200).
At the booth of Stockholm dealer Aldy Milliken are several works by Felix Gmelin, including a videotape of the artist’s late father, a philosopher and something of a 1960s love child, that shows the old man and a young girl carefully massaging each other with oil paints on a bed of gessoed canvases. Move over, Yves Klein! Gmelin’s 45-minute DVD, in an edition of five, is €5,000.
More video on the menu? At Frankfurt’s Galerie Anita Beckers is Sweet Wind in Your Face (2004), a completely different 30-minute computer animation by Yves Netzhammer, whose digitally generated android figures embark on a series of poetic metamorphoses -- a figure emerges from a bath, a hand tickles the bottom of a foot, a butterfly alights and a corral appears around it. The work is €9,000 in an edition of eight.
Also popular with Beckers’ collectors is the prizewinning 1997 DVD by Bjorn Melhus, titled No Sunshine, that features the artist as a pair of twin yellow-wigged clones speaking to each other in an alien melodrama whose narrative is composed solely of protovocal snippets from the Jackson Five and Stevie Wonder. It’s cool, in an unlimited edition, at €300 each.
***
The dense art fair bazaar has its appeal, but can rarely match the focus and scale of a good gallery show. Berlin’s vitality as a global art center is easily demonstrated by the large number of important exhibitions that can be found in the city, many of them premieres. Examples abound this month during Art Forum Berlin.
At Arndt & Partner, which celebrates its 10th anniversary this week, is "True Stories," an exhibition of 30 photo-and-text works from the retrospective "Autobiographies, 1988-2003" by the French artist Sophie Calle. It’s impossible to remain unaffected by the alluring artist and her short stories, which tell of things that happened to her, sad and sweet memories and dreams, events she staged of love and heartbreak, all the details of an intensely romantic life, which come alive with the poignancy of a French movie. It’s a sentimental journey, and an art of far greater intimacy than is typical.