Highlights of a warm, sunny day:
We attended a brunch for Elizabeth Peyton’s new show at a space at Wallstrasse 84. A rough brick and concrete interior with a strange balcony surrounding the interior set off with ornate ironwork. It was suggested that the room had once been a ballroom and more lately a showroom for bathroom fixtures, but it made a good showplace for Elizabeth’s new, always small-format paintings. Her style continues to evolve into more rounded, flowing forms, with the portraits of known persons in her own or a broader celebrity circle having softer lines and angles than before and, in general, appearing less spare and austere. The show also included four or five still lifes, and these were softer-outlined and more color-saturated than earlier works. All in all a very satisfying viewing experience. The best part of the event was the chance for a chat with one of our favorite artists, Simon Starling, who was accompanying his absolutely gorgeous infant daughter, Alice.
Lunch was along the way we were walking westerly along Leipzigerstrasse, outdoors at an expensively outfitted Vietnamese restaurant. The area had the earmarks of a Vietnamese government installation, an informal PR embassy. Excellent beef and wheat noodles in broth.
We then walked further west first to a cappuccino at a sidewalk cafe and then further into the Mitte area on Markgrafenstrasse. The first stop was Carlier-Gebauer for the Mark Wallinger exhibition. Within a few minutes I recognized a rather high-pitched voice I soon identified with a remarkable work of Wallinger’s of about six years ago that was shown at a Venice Biennale. This was a ten minute or so video of a blind man with a cane, snap-brimmed hat and sunglasses on a down escalator, apparently walking up backwards at the same speed at which the escalator was going down, tapping the cane and reciting the Gospel by St. John ("In the beginning was the word..." - eerie). Sure enough, it was Wallinger himself in the gallery, talking with visitors and commenting on his installation. We had a chat about St. John, which he was somewhat startled to note somebody had remembered, and he cheerfully spoke of his new work: The large gallery space had been divided into two parts, one, an orderly placement of about 60 chairs all connected to a point on the wall at the front of the space by an individual red ribbon, some ribbons being up to 35 feet long, the assemblage devoted to portraying the human mind in its conscious, rational mode. The other half of the space had photographs on the wall, each depicting a man or woman sleeping in a public space such as a bus or park bench, signifying the unconscious mode. Well done and interesting, up to a point. Wallinger himself, now mid-fortyish and portly, turned out to be a thoroughly delightful fellow.
The next stop was Barbara Thumm’s space. Barbara graciously showed us around her smaller space that was showing a few paintings, or rather “assemblages,” by Anna Oppermann (1940-1993), who had been far ahead of her time in her collages and composite paintings, often done by laying images in photo emulsion on to canvas, during her heyday in the seventies and early ‘80’s. We were taken next to Barbara’s large new space where she was showing paintings by Jo Baer, the fabled New York painter who is now 81 years old. Baer is still largely known for her seventies’ astringent and tightly done minimalist paintings. A lyrical, softly colored and figurative period began in the early ‘80’s, and these were selections from the later work that Barbara had pried out of Ms. Baer through interventions of mutual friends that had taken months to bear fruit. Examples of the works can be seen if you go to http://www.bthumm.de/
After lunch we took an U-Bahn ride and walked briefly through an East Kreuzberg neighborhood to Peres Projects. Javier was showing Kirstine Roepstorff. Not her best work. We waited for Javier, who was hosting a gallery diiner nearby, as long as we could before leaving, but we found him on the street, dressed as usual in a made-to-make-you-gasp outfit trimmed with sport logos. We had a cordial, old time talk, mostly business as it turned out, when he had to hurry off to join clients.
Early evening found us at the Capitain-Petzel gallery on Karl-Marx Allee, in a glass fronted, flat-roofed building from the Communist ‘50’s. There one of the managing partners, Friedrich Petzel, a New York Chelsea gallerist, took us through the Tory Brauntuch show. Brauntuch had been prominent in New York in the late ‘70’s along with others who had formed the appropriation school and had largely gone underground to Texas, when Friedrich found him out and cajoled him back into the art world. As a result, Brauntuch’s paintings are selling in the six figures, and the work appears to be very strong. Brauntuch himself was in the gallery in deep conversation with Tommy Solomon, now a Los Angeles gallerist and son of the legendary New York gallerist, Holly Solomon. Tommy had shown Troy fifteen or twenty years ago, and the two were busy closing the circles. We did not interrupt them. http://www.capitainpetzel.de.
The day ended with a brief visit to neugerriemschneider for a great show and our standing by while a host of gallery visitors entered the room where the Mark Dion tree spoken of in the blog of a few days ago had been installed. We were gratified by all the sober attention which the “Library for the Birds of New York” appeared to be eliciting.
Next and finally was the taxi ride to the Villa Elisabeth, a nineteenth century mansion somewhere in the endless tracts off Invalidenstrasse that make up that part of East Berlin. The once majestic house is now a shabby shell of itself, but enough seedy elegance remains to make it an excellent party/dinner venue. We joined about 150 other intrepid souls for the joint opening night dinner for neugerriemschneider and the Neu Galerie, another venue where we have been hanging out for twelve or fifteen years. The meal was excellent, and many art notables were in attendance. We sat with a contingent from Basel responsible for the Basel Kunsthalle and the redoubtable Basel Art Fair, the main watering hole event for contemporary art people worldwide which is held in Basel the second weekend of every year. The food and drink were terrific (delicious antipasto, an asparagus risotto and a tender white fish filet). We were alert enough to hail a taxi out on the street about half past midnight, and made it safely back to our apartment.
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