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Come and create with your eyes closed. Quiet your inner art critic and enter a deep state of meditation all guided by your sense of touch. Let the soft clay take you to a space deep inside yourself and discover yourself outside of the scope of judging eyes. Who are you when nobody is looking? What do you secretly dream of? Find out in this weekends Blindfolded Sculpting.
My name is Thuli and I’m a medical doctor artist and art therapist from Berlin. It is my mission to enable people to live a more creative and therefor healthier life.
Tickets: https://www.thuliwolf.com/events/blindfolded-sculpting/
![Finja Sander - passiv aggressiv [set up], 2023](https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/644bf1ce6f28a5a7c747b8e5/653bd416cbe9639e1db27984_IMG_1171.WEBP)
The team of galerie burster is pleased to present in cooperation with the UdK Berlin the winners of the UdK Berlin Art Award Finja Sander, Mateo Contreras Gallego, Shinoh Nam and Seungjun Lee in a joint group exhibition. This will be followed by solo exhibitions of each of the award winners. Starting in 2023, the UdK Berlin Art Award will be offered annually in the Fac- ulty of Fine Arts and in the Art and Media program at the Faculty of Design at the UdK Berlin. Under the chairmanship of the president, the jury, which is made up of well-known people from Berlin's art and cultural life as well as professors from the UdK Berlin, will award the prize to four master's students from the same year. The prize includes a joint exhibition, a solo exhibition and a monographic catalog for the prize winners. The UdK Berlin Art Award continues the tradition of the Preis des Präsidenten der UdK Berlin, awarded from 1997 – 2022.
Finja Sander | Mateo Contreras Gallego | Shinoh Nam | Seungjun Lee
Psychoanalysis of Fire is a multi sensory, multichannel sound installation that draws on Gaston Bachelard's book of the same name. Bachelard examines fire as a source of fear and fascination, a symbol of life and death, something both intimate and universal, and perhaps most essentially as the “first object of reverie, the symbol of repose.” The composition focuses on the acoustic byproducts of combustion, deeply ingrained in the human experience yet consistently either overlooked or extremely fraught in contemporary society. These sounds are echoed by recordings of extended instrumental techniques that reconstruct the spatial and timbral qualities of a slowly dying bonfire. Employing heat and light from infrared sources, the piece considers the anthropological context and social connotations of fire and flame. Fire is examined not as a chemical process, but as a psycho sensory construct.
In the exhibition by Anne Jungjohann and Enrico Niemann, we encounter multifaceted processes that generate tactile pictorial objects through folding and unfolding. In their unique approaches, they reveal and conceal details of painted and folded surfaces, thus creating images that oscillate between two-dimensionality and three-dimensionality, between spatial illusion and an emphasis on the tangible painterly surface.
The manifold is encountered in philosophy as a multitude of sensory impressions and serves as the foundation for empirical knowledge. Bergson considered it a continuum for time, something fluid, changeable, and related to perception. In mathematics, manifold is used to describe curved, complex surfaces and spaces. The two artists also utilize the malleability of materials and the potential for procedural change in diverse ways as the starting point for their intricate pictorial compositions.
Niemann uses folds as the basis for his paintings and objects. He constructs and shapes the support material where the painting processes take place to create thin layers of color, which are then transferred to paper. This results in color fields that rise and expand into space, filling it like a topographic landscape. Alternatively, they are spread out like a map, revealing intricate entanglements in colorful gradients.
Jungjohann composes her pictorial objects inspired by digital visual worlds through the deconstruction and re-composition of her own paintings. In the series of fold works, she uses the layering and folding of previously painted canvas material to create reliefs with irregular contours in an analogue image editing process. This gives rise to emblematic forms of expression that interact with the physical image body in the space.
Biographical notes on Anne Jungjohann and Enrico Niemann.
Within a series of dreamscapes – burrows, caves, forests, islands and oceans – ethereal figures embrace, collapse and melt into their surroundings. Amy Beager’s latest series of paintings continue her fascination with Greek mythology and fairy tales to explore the idea of and longing for paradise. Her solo exhibition at Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery in Berlin takes us on a journey into a watery world where scenes of romance and tragedy play out as hallucinatory visions, feverish dreams.
Beager’s work explores the boundaries between the body and nature, reality and the spiritual or supernatural. While her compositions often refer to motifs from art history or specific mythological narratives, the colours, lines and textures develop through the painting process, resulting in fluid, textured forms that seem to merge in and out of focus. This latest body of work, in particular, explores our relationship to and dependence on the natural world, not just plant life but also animals.
A series of works on paper feature depictions of the artist’s cat Ashitaka in brightly coloured, other-worldly spaces that feel almost shine-like. In one, he is elevated to the status of a saint or angel, with a thin luminous halo floating above his head. These works were created following the cat’s diagnosis with cancer and they are revealing not just of Beager’s deep love and respect for the animal, but of her admiration for his resilience and majesty.
Other, larger-scale paintings depict instances of human love and sorrow. After Etty, an interpretation of a William Etty painting based on the Greek myth of Hero and Leander, envisions the tragic reunion of two lovers. As the story goes, Leander swims each night across the ocean to meet with Hero who lives in a tower on an opposite island; however, one night he drowns in a storm. In Beager’s painting, his body is still half submerged in the water, while Hero appears to have thrown herself down the rocks in grief, her arms cradling his head.
In Burrow and Sky, we again encounter two figures locked in a romantic embrace, but rather than being exposed to the elements they are cocooned in a cave, their limbs entwining not just with one another’s but with the vines and leaves that grow up around them. Meanwhile, in Immortality Tree a figure’s body has melded into a tree, their limbs inextricable from its trunk and roots. In a sense, both of these works are a depiction of the life cycle in which we are sustained by and eventually returned to the earth.
For Beager, paradise is equated with this symbiotic relationship to nature, but also with a kind of self sacrificial desire, in which the individual is subsumed by their love for another. This love, as depicted in Beager’s works, has the ability to transcend boundaries of place, time and even species. It is dangerous, all encompassing and startlingly beautiful.
OMG. The title of this exhibition is a provocation. As an abbreviation, these three letters often serve as nothing more than a placeholder in the syntax of our feelings. As an exclamation, OMG marks our strongest emotions: astonishment, joy, horror. At the same time OMG has the power to drone out these feelings with a thick Valley-accent: oh my god, did you see that? When uttered in full, however, the banal formula „oh my god“ simultaneously evokes echoes of the most profound things. „My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?“ asks Jesus in the darkest hour on the cross. The Son of Man doubting a God that seems inscrutable, hidden, absent.
I visit the painter Henri Haake in his studio on Köpenicker Strasse in Kreuzberg. Centrally located, almost in Mitte: a stroke of luck under the conditions of a Berlin threatened by monetary fossilisation. And yet this street seems to be strangely removed from the city. An industrial area on the Spree without a riverbank, without a promenade; the view goes out to the distant glass towers of Friedrichshain, which seem to rise up artificially, as if simulated on a green screen. In summer, a few old fishermen sometimes meet behind the warehouse, sitting on camping chairs and drinking beer, waiting to pull a catch out of the murky river.
This too seems like a typical Haake scene, I think to myself. I came here to see Haake’s paintings for the new exhibition. It's not hard to imagine how Henri Haake takes everyday experiences of urban life – loud, absurd, chaotic – to the monkish solitude of his studio in a former office building, turning these experiences into the starting points for his paintings. I ask him: is he a chronicler, a painter of the everyday? Henri Haake mulls it over. „Yes, and no, “ he finally says. We are standing in front of his large piece Eden (190×230 cm), which Haake painted earlier this year. Here, too, we encounter the provocative juxtaposition of a mundane garden scene with the numinous: biblical paradise, the site of creation, the scene of original sin. Not that there is much to see: we seem to glimpse at a suburban lawn being watered, but the paint is applied so translucently it looks as if the grass-green color is about to be washed away by the rain of artificial irrigation. „I'm not interested in reality as level of detail, “ Haake says. His attention is decidedly on painterly gesture. Undeniably, this shift is part of his artistic development in recent years: figuration is losing ground to expressivity. The level of detail recedes behind smoke or cloud-like foam in Cleopatra Lounge (150×130cm) or Beyond the Clouds (130×110cm) as if behind a metaphor for painting itself.
Haake works quickly. During summer he was happy when the high temperatures allowed the paint to dry more quickly so that he could apply the next layer. Neither this speed nor the apparent randomness of layer upon layer of paint, however, diminishes the precision of his composition, the formalism it emphasises.
The compositions are precise and clear, based on careful sketches, the perspectives partly evoke a photographer's view, on which the painter Haake also trained himself. Does the ubiquity of the digital flow of images equal devaluation? Not at all, Haake contends. His pictorial strategy arises out of a fascination for simultaneity that turns his works into oscillating riddles: are we seeing rays of sunshine in an iPhone snapshot? Or is this the golden light of the Holy Spirit as painted by an early Renaissance master? (Ray Of Light, 40×30cm). Looking at Fata Morgana (190×230 cm), do we see an idyllic but profane reality, a cut-out from a classical bathing scene? Or do we stare into a maelstrom of hell from which grotesque faces look back at us like Bartholomew carrying his own skin in Michelangelo's „Last Judgment“?
Despite their enigmatic nature, Haake's paintings are never about showing off. The more they emphasise the texture of painting over that of reality, the more subtle they become.The color palette is muted, and what is representational in these works has been, quite literally, pushed to the edge. They are unstable images, puzzles without pedantry, and hidden in the range of possible readings there is always a joke, an ironic mischievousness. What are we looking at? Something quite normal ? Something sacrosanct ? Or perhaps nothing at all? Concealed insignia of faith or cheap fashion jewellery? (Companion, 50×98cm). What we encounter in Henri Haake's paintings, I think as I leave the studio and step onto the twilight of Köpenicker Strasse, is not so much everyday life as the fleeting moments of transcendence within it, visible only to those who want to see. Bus 140 pulls up and my gaze falls on the tired faces of the passengers, brightly lit. The absence of something, I conclude, it is not nothing.
DITTRICH & SCHLECHTRIEM is pleased to present ÁL VARO TAVARES D’GUILHERME’s (b. 1992, Luanda, Angola; lives and works in Berlin) debut solo show with the gallery. Titled No church wild, the exhibition opens Friday, October 27, 6–8 PM and is on view through December 9. It includes a new series of large-format acrylic and oil compositions on canvas and a mirrored installation and drawing reflecting the hanging in the main gallery space.
D’Guilherme identifies as part of a Neo Brut movement—a cocktail of New Brutalism and art brut—creating visual landscapes, tablescapes, and nightscapes depicting city life in Berlin while also taking inspiration from the substantial time he spent developing his practice while living and working in Lisbon, Portugal. The artist aims for the purest form of creative expression in his paintings, blending rawness and precision. As the title No church wild with its nihilistic implication of no meaning, value, or purpose in the world suggests, D’Guilherme’s work thrives without strict labels, including devalued art-historical references and layered iconography, as in the title piece, which feels like a slick apped-out smartphone screen reflecting on the world around us and how we navigate it with intuitive awareness and recklessness. His art and attitude resist a conforming to predetermined narratives and locations, often manifested in words and short texts layered and tattooed into surfaces and materials pulled from varying unconventional sources.
Writing, for me, is omnipresent. Writing is palpable in a textural way in my works, for example, through materials that protrude from the canvas, such as wood, that form letters or words. I refer to my poems as science and laws in space. But if you call it poetry, maybe some poets will get mad at me.
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