Is everything bigger in Berlin? We enjoyed the rather epic nature of the city’s new openings, with Dieter Meier, Chiharu Shiota, Ugo Rondinone and Sterling Ruby.
The intimate scale of Berlin’s abc—scaled down in fact from last year’s exhibition to one hall of Station Berlin, with a total of 60 galleries—allows for more of an exploration of the city than the locked-in nature of your typical sprawling fair, with Berlin Art Week and the many surrounding openings providing plenty of variety for the heaving Friday-night crowds, and a chance to delve into the city itself. Space seemed to greet us everywhere we went, from wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling. For rent-squeezed Londoners such gallery spaces are a rare luxury, here, they’re abundant.
We began the evening at Mihuț Boșcu Kafchin’s studio, situated above Galerie Judin on Potsdamer Strasse and offering the ideal vantage point as the street below filled with people. The Romanian artist is in residency in advance of a solo exhibition at the gallery, loading the high walls of the light-filled space with large- and small-scale paintings which bridge the realms of reality and fantasy, recognisable objects succumbing to their dark—and occasionally fiery—surroundings.
Downstairs, Blain|Southern opened the epic work by Chiharu Shiota—along similar lines to The Key in the Hand, shown in the Japanese Pavilion at last year’s Venice Biennale. Uncertain Journey fills much of the gallery’s large atrium, stretching out to the most far-away corners, and is formed from 350km of red yard. The piece is the culmination of 13 days work with 10 assistants and is so dense in parts that the pillar-box red almost looks like a solid form.
Next door, Galerie Judin hosted the opening for Dieter Meier’s Possible Beings 1973-2016. The photo series exists in two parts; photographs of the artist in 1973 as a host of wonderfully eccentric characters, and updated 2005 or 2016 versions. For each character Meier wrote an imagined bio—favourites include Kurt “Küde” Spähni, a show-biz obsessed trapeze artist from Basel, and porn distributor Samuel “Samy” Schnyder. True to form, the artist was present signing enormous posters of himself as “Samy” with a spangly silver highlighter. Swoon.
On to Esther Schipper, on the city’s nearby Schöneberger Ufer—a gallery-packed road which runs alongside Landwehrkanal—for the opening of Ugo Rondinone’s Two Men Contemplating The Moon. Rondinone’s simple yet commanding works align well the with asymmetric gallery rooms and stark white walls, emphasising the tonal qualities of the block silver and concrete works.
We took a final stop at Sprüth Magers, by mid-evening swimming with visitors navigating Sterling Ruby’s precarious installation, on Oranienburger Straße. For the first time Ruby’s mobile sculptures SCALES are presented as one, hanging domineeringly overhead, at eye-level, up in the corners and down in your face. Everyday objects mix with those which appear to be formed just for art’s sake, held together by various chains, hooks and strips of metal. Although static at our moment of viewing, it feels as though the slightest tap could set the whole thing in motion, swaying about, and perhaps, crashing down.
