http://www.faz.com/IN/INtemplates/eFAZ/docmain.asp?rub=%7BB1311FFE-FBFB-11D2-B228-00105A9CAF88%7D&doc=%7BD7156391-044F-4D77-B9AB-2B5732BF0D77%7D
By Niklas Maak
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
The seasons were out of synch during the past autumn weekend in Berlin. A strange pseudo-spring had set in over the city, and the Berlin folk who had already prepared themselves for the Siberian, grey winter months were sitting outside in the cafes.
Thus it was all the more astonishing that despite the sensational outside temperatures, crowds pushed unwaveringly through two Berlin exhibitions that could not be less alike: the Flick Collection in the Hamburger Bahnhof, and the newly opened Berlinische Galerie, the State Museum for Modern Art, Photography and Architecture in Berlin's Kreuzberg district, which reported the proud figure of 23,000 visitors only a few days after its inauguration.
Yet it had looked for a long time as if visitors would not be able to get to see the Berlinische Galerie collection for a protracted period. Seven years ago, the gallery, which was established in 1975, had to move out of the Gropius building, when it was claimed by the German government as an exhibition hall, and has been searching desperately for a new home ever since.
The collection ranges from the Berlin Secession through the Russian avant-garde which was active in Berlin, through Dada, post-war abstraction and Neue Wilde, an impetuous way of painting practiced by artists in the 1980s, which was related to both figuration and abstraction, right up to contemporary artists like Thomas Demand, and also has a small collection of Berlin-related photographs and architecture in stock.
It was initially meant to be shown in the Altes Postfuhramt, a former collection point for the German Post Office dating from 1875 and now used as a venue for exhibitions and lectures, in the Berlin Mitte district. However, the Berlin Senate did not want to finance it. Afterwards, the grounds of the former Schultheiss brewery was selected as an alternative, but the investor went bankrupt in 2001.
It was only the prospect of moving into the former glass stores in Alte Jakobstrasse in the Kreuzberg district that brought a solution within reach. This warehouse was then converted at a cost of €18.7 billion by Munich-based Dibag Industriebau-AG, whose architects Jörg Fricke and Juan de Diego normally concern themselves with inexpensive designs for car showrooms and shopping centers.
They purposely did not choose an architectural icon of the 21st century, explained gallery director Jörn Merkert at the opening ceremony defiantly, and Dibag certainly knew how to avoid any symbolism in the building.
After entering an 11-meter-high hall, which is dedicated to contemporary Berlin art, one walks past Svetlana Kopystiansky's book tower towards Frank Thiel's monumental photographic portraits of Allied soldiers that were created in 1994 and then turns off into the past, to Edward and Nancy Kienholz' sculptures and Rainer Fetting's outpourings of color, to K. H. Hödicke and Marwan, before climbing a double staircase to the Berlin Secession, the Dadaists and art in the post-war period.
Up here, too, the gallery's tight budget is only noticeable, if at all, in the lighting. Ikea spotlights cast a light on the exhibits that is reminiscent of dentists' surgeries and thrift exhibitions and make the exhibits appear more provincial than they are.
Yet not everything one gets to see is of the same quality, and one would have wished that some works in the Flick Collection were presented as opulently as Wolf Vostell or Emilio Vedova in the Berlinische Galerie. However, the charm of the latter - and the big difference to the Flick Collection, in which everything has already been seen somewhere else - lies precisely in the discovery of unknown or long forgotten artists.
Apart from the hall with the changing exhibitions, what is interesting about the new cultural institute in Berlin is the room that has been baptized “Jetzt/now,“ in which artists working in Berlin that are still unknown are presented. It opens with Austrian artist Eva Grubinger's “Dark Matter“ sculptures, a minimalist assemblage of black, man-sized models of high-rise buildings, reactor cooling towers and hypertrophic headphones.
Above and beyond its galleries and art clubs, Berlin does not possess such a room for contemporary art, now that the Hamburger Bahnhof has fin-ally become a mausoleum of big collectors' ambitions with the Flick Collection and the Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art in the Auguststrasse, to whom we owe the discovery of an entire generation of Berlin artists from Jonathan Meese to John Bock, is hardly demonstrating any zeal in this direction any more either.
The success of the Berlinische Galerie will also depend on how this room is played as no one will travel every weekend to Kreuzberg to look at Wolf Vostell. However, if the gallery succeeds in showing interesting trends, amalgamating new currents and discovering artists, the Berlinische Galerie has a good chance of becoming an interesting new location for contemporary art - and of tempting the public more often into an area of the city which despite its proximity to the Jewish Museum has up to now led an existence in the twilight zone in an eccentric idyll composed of petting zoo and old IBA buildings, an apartment complex built in 1982/83 for the International Buildings Exhibition in 1984 and owned, incidentally, by Dibag Industriebau-AG.
Oct. 29
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By Niklas Maak
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
The seasons were out of synch during the past autumn weekend in Berlin. A strange pseudo-spring had set in over the city, and the Berlin folk who had already prepared themselves for the Siberian, grey winter months were sitting outside in the cafes.
Thus it was all the more astonishing that despite the sensational outside temperatures, crowds pushed unwaveringly through two Berlin exhibitions that could not be less alike: the Flick Collection in the Hamburger Bahnhof, and the newly opened Berlinische Galerie, the State Museum for Modern Art, Photography and Architecture in Berlin's Kreuzberg district, which reported the proud figure of 23,000 visitors only a few days after its inauguration.
Yet it had looked for a long time as if visitors would not be able to get to see the Berlinische Galerie collection for a protracted period. Seven years ago, the gallery, which was established in 1975, had to move out of the Gropius building, when it was claimed by the German government as an exhibition hall, and has been searching desperately for a new home ever since.
The collection ranges from the Berlin Secession through the Russian avant-garde which was active in Berlin, through Dada, post-war abstraction and Neue Wilde, an impetuous way of painting practiced by artists in the 1980s, which was related to both figuration and abstraction, right up to contemporary artists like Thomas Demand, and also has a small collection of Berlin-related photographs and architecture in stock.
It was initially meant to be shown in the Altes Postfuhramt, a former collection point for the German Post Office dating from 1875 and now used as a venue for exhibitions and lectures, in the Berlin Mitte district. However, the Berlin Senate did not want to finance it. Afterwards, the grounds of the former Schultheiss brewery was selected as an alternative, but the investor went bankrupt in 2001.
It was only the prospect of moving into the former glass stores in Alte Jakobstrasse in the Kreuzberg district that brought a solution within reach. This warehouse was then converted at a cost of €18.7 billion by Munich-based Dibag Industriebau-AG, whose architects Jörg Fricke and Juan de Diego normally concern themselves with inexpensive designs for car showrooms and shopping centers.
They purposely did not choose an architectural icon of the 21st century, explained gallery director Jörn Merkert at the opening ceremony defiantly, and Dibag certainly knew how to avoid any symbolism in the building.
After entering an 11-meter-high hall, which is dedicated to contemporary Berlin art, one walks past Svetlana Kopystiansky's book tower towards Frank Thiel's monumental photographic portraits of Allied soldiers that were created in 1994 and then turns off into the past, to Edward and Nancy Kienholz' sculptures and Rainer Fetting's outpourings of color, to K. H. Hödicke and Marwan, before climbing a double staircase to the Berlin Secession, the Dadaists and art in the post-war period.
Up here, too, the gallery's tight budget is only noticeable, if at all, in the lighting. Ikea spotlights cast a light on the exhibits that is reminiscent of dentists' surgeries and thrift exhibitions and make the exhibits appear more provincial than they are.
Yet not everything one gets to see is of the same quality, and one would have wished that some works in the Flick Collection were presented as opulently as Wolf Vostell or Emilio Vedova in the Berlinische Galerie. However, the charm of the latter - and the big difference to the Flick Collection, in which everything has already been seen somewhere else - lies precisely in the discovery of unknown or long forgotten artists.
Apart from the hall with the changing exhibitions, what is interesting about the new cultural institute in Berlin is the room that has been baptized “Jetzt/now,“ in which artists working in Berlin that are still unknown are presented. It opens with Austrian artist Eva Grubinger's “Dark Matter“ sculptures, a minimalist assemblage of black, man-sized models of high-rise buildings, reactor cooling towers and hypertrophic headphones.
Above and beyond its galleries and art clubs, Berlin does not possess such a room for contemporary art, now that the Hamburger Bahnhof has fin-ally become a mausoleum of big collectors' ambitions with the Flick Collection and the Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art in the Auguststrasse, to whom we owe the discovery of an entire generation of Berlin artists from Jonathan Meese to John Bock, is hardly demonstrating any zeal in this direction any more either.
The success of the Berlinische Galerie will also depend on how this room is played as no one will travel every weekend to Kreuzberg to look at Wolf Vostell. However, if the gallery succeeds in showing interesting trends, amalgamating new currents and discovering artists, the Berlinische Galerie has a good chance of becoming an interesting new location for contemporary art - and of tempting the public more often into an area of the city which despite its proximity to the Jewish Museum has up to now led an existence in the twilight zone in an eccentric idyll composed of petting zoo and old IBA buildings, an apartment complex built in 1982/83 for the International Buildings Exhibition in 1984 and owned, incidentally, by Dibag Industriebau-AG.
Oct. 29
--
The Design-L list for art and architecture, since 1992...
To subscribe, send mailto:design-l-subscribe-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx.
To signoff, send mailto:design-l-unsubscribe-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx.
Visit archives: http://lists.psu.edu/archives/design-l.html