AK Galerie: Multifaceted Meanings

AK Galerie is also connecting the practices of two artists, Lorenzo Agius and Izzy Weissgerber, presenting for the occasion the exhibition ICONIC. The show leaves the walls of their beautiful gallery in Mitte to land in a specific location, St. Elisabeth-Kirche. The dialogue stems from the place, and investigates the concept of being an icon in all its facets. From Medieval religious portraits to celebrity culture, the exhibition brilliantly reconnects all the dots about its underlying meanings. 

What is also interesting is the interaction between the two artists’ practices. Agius is known for his intimate portraits of acclaimed celebrities and global icons, depicted through a powerful immediacy. Weissgerber took his pictures as a starting point to create impactful mixed media canvases, giving them a new life and meaning. The exhibition, according to gallerist Anna Kimmerle, lies specifically at this intersection between Agius’s composed portraits and Weissgerber’s visceral impulse, making us reason on the ancient yet incredibly contemporary meaning of an icon and its many expressions.

EBENSPERGER: Bodies as Artworks

EBENSPERGER decided to focus their show for BGW to the celebration of performance art and its impact on us. REMAINS by Göksu Kunak is an exhibition made out of performers, interacting with the space as artworks, and creating art while moving in it. The exhibition takes inspiration from an iconic exhibition by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and reasons on how immaterial forces, such as gestures, sounds, movements and tensions condense into matter. 

The actions are reiterated by various performers: bodybuilders, karate practitioners, pole dancers, suspended performers. All of this creates an immersive experience in the beautiful bunker space of EBENSPERGER, and rather than resolving the tension, it exposes it in its multiple facets and essences, making us reason on how art can always be alive and connected to us on the deepest visceral levels.

Galerie EIGEN + ART Berlin: Powerful Encounters

Addressing another form of tension, the one that arises from noncommittal encounters, is the exhibition occasional lovers by Brett Charles Seiler at Galerie EIGEN + ART Berlin. The exhibition, immersively staged as if we are entering in the artist’s studio, is made out of a series of paintings, shifting from moments of intimacy and lust, to detachment and distraction. 

“There is something unsettling about the word ‘occasional’”, the artist suggests. “There are secrets and shadows, there is shame”. This sexual tension unfolds in the portraits through this restlessness, and through Seiler’s ability to navigate between detachment and closeness, between forgetting and urgency. Nothing is actually forgotten though –  everything, all the feelings and the smallest details of our randomest encounters – are remembered and immortalized. The exhibition powerfully shows us yet again how life-changing a casual meeting can be, and how easily and subtly we can impact one another.

EIGEN + ART Lab is also presenting Die Lücke, die der Teufel lässt by Nils Ben Brahim. Taking as a starting point the eponymous book by Alexander Kluge, the artist makes paintings to investigate the contradictions embedded in our society. Despite the prevailing narrative, our recent past and our present have proved how evil has persisted as a systematic gap, filled with historical raptures and social conflicts. By investigating the dichotomies we keep on facing, Ben Brahim makes us reason about our present from a new perspective, and stimulates us to jump into this gap, to try to understand it.

max goelitz: Deep into the Light

For Perspectives, the new format created by BGW this year, max goelitz is presenting the immersive work of acclaimed American artist James Turrell. His practice is based on a reconfiguration of our relationship with light, experienced not as a means of illumination, but as a spatial phenomenon and as a place for consciousness. What matters to the artist, and what made him so iconic, is his focus on sensorial awareness and durational experiences. 

The show will present various series, both from the past and the present of his prolific career, also interacting with the gallery space itself and modifying its architecture. With First Cause for example, Turrell reconnects us to the cosmos and to the origin of philosophy, inviting us to focus on our sensitivity and relationship to space. With this beautiful exhibition, the artist once again shows us how light can be used to understand the act of seeing itself, without taking anything for granted.

CHAUSSEE 36 Photography: Seeing the Unseen

CHAUSSEE 36 Photography is opening during BGW an exhibition by German photographer Harf Zimmermann. Since the beginning, the artist’s practice has been focusing on things that go unnoticed, on the unseen, showing it to us with an unexpected clarity. The title of the exhibition itself, So, what have we got here? connects his vision to the familiar question that a detective asks before starting an investigation. 

Reality is always investigated with his pictures, also through time and space. The exhibition in fact collects pictures from over four decades of career, from around the 1990s to the present day. “To the extent that nothing seems to happen, time is presented as historical meaning, universally accessible and at the same time eluding definition”. commented Thilo Billmeier, the curator of the show, summarizing the power of Zimmermann’s practice and reminding us of the beauty that lies in the act of looking.

Galerie Max Hetzler: Investigating Our Reality

For BGW Galerie Max Hetzler is opening three new exhibitions, investigating our relationship with reality in many different ways. In their gallery in Potsdamer Staße, they will open The Self Assessed, a collective exhibition on self-portraits curated by Cornelius Tittel. Faces are considered the most fascinating surface on earth, a place for projection, a stage, a socio-political battlefield. In this specific territory, the exhibition unfolds and through a series of self-portraits by acclaimed artists from different times and backgrounds, it makes us reflect on our inner and outer selves.  

At their gallery in Bleibtreustraße, they will present Between the Lines, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Darren Almond. The focus of these paintings is the relationship of the artist with willows, and a reasoning on number zero as a reconnector of beginnings and ends, an eternal circle of life and death.

"I had this moment as a young boy," Almond recalls, "of being completely overwhelmed by the intensity of sunlight, of its reflection across the surface of the water, the silhouetted backlit branches of a willow hanging over the pond, the intense contrast of it all. It’s an incredibly sharp, crystalline memory, and it’s one I’ve carried for almost fifty years. When you hold onto memories for such an amount of time, they start to solidify, they inform and become you, become something more than themselves. That’s why I felt it necessary to investigate this 'something' I’ve cherished for all these years – memories veiled by the prismatic light of experience.”

Last, at their third gallery in Goethestraße, they will open an exhibition by Vivien Zhang, her first one with Max Hetzler, titled Field Conditions. The title refers to the variability of circumstances that can happen in real life, and their impact on studied plans. Through this reference, Zheng addresses with her paintings important themes such as migration, technology and nature, challenging the way we perceive and interpret things.

alexander levy: We Are One

alexander levy is showcasing from May 1 Riders on the Storm by Anne Duk Hee Jordan. The exhibition considers ecosystems as processes, unfolding in multisensorial environments where ecologies intertwine. With her works she also powerfully shifts the focus away from our anthropocentric view of the world, reconnecting us with all the other fundamental pieces of our planet. 

Her environments act as liminal spaces, for us to interact with the rest of the living world, and give it the proper importance it deserves. If one thinks of the spatial journey that Artemis II recently did around the moon and of the general troubling context our world is currently living in, it becomes even more important to remember and celebrate our interconnection, not only with our species, but with our planet and all living things. 

BETTER GO SOUTH: Celebrating Graffiti Art

BETTER GO SOUTH is showcasing for the occasion a group show dedicated to the celebration of graffiti art. With NO FACE NO CASE, they address graffiti as both a visual language and a cultural practice, tracing its forms of expression through time and space. The place that graffiti holds in the urban environment says a lot about who we are as a species: it can be a marker of presence, a form of rebellion, and it is as varied as humanity can be. 

The exhibition also investigates the contrast that lies in them, and in us as an extension: from the apparent immediacy of gesture, to the complex network of references, to the identity definition they can create. This year The Columbist will host a new art brunch in collaboration with BETTER GO SOUTH. Surrounded by these interesting artworks, we will have once again the chance to discuss art together and meet in person. 

One extra tip for a correlated event is the exhibition Belonging by Anne Grosse-Leege at Rosa-Luxemburg-Straße 28. Focusing on another connection that arises in a community – the sense of belonging and its multifaceted meanings – the exhibition is an exploration of its infinite shades. The sense of belonging is a fundamental part of our humanity, and it can be felt in the most various ways: it can shift in time and space, it can be inherited or recreated, tangible or ephemeral. Through Grosse-Leege’s pictures, we can see it all happen in a dense and poetic way.