Postcard from Berlin, 2. (Inc. Hamburger Bahnhof and Boros Collection)

Brandenburger Tor

Day 2 in Berlin began with a visit to the Hamburger Bahnhof: Museum für Gegenwart (Museum of Contemporary Art). The building is a converted C19 railway station in neoclassical style - its facade now handsomely adorned by a Dan Flavin neon light installation.

Time was limited, so I gave my attention entirely to the displays from the permanent collection rather than the temporary installation by Mariana Castillo Deball: Parergon, an examination of the lives and status of museum objects - interesting though that sounds. The permanent collection is currently represented principally by works by Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, William Kentridge, Cy Twombly, Anselm Kiefer, Dan Flavin and Joseph Beuys (the latter occupying a whole wing of the museum).

Andy Warhol, Big Electric Chair, 1967

Cy Twombly, Empire of Flora, 1961

William Kentridge, still from Journey to the Moon, 2003

Dan Flavin, installation in Hamburger Bahnhof, 1996

Joseph Beuys, Unschlitt, 1977 (detail)

The Beuys installation is impressive: I found Unschlitt (Tallow) particularly interestng. Originally made for an exhibition in Munster in 1977 it comprises 20 tons of beef fat, cut into blocks, which (allegedly) 'never get cold'. The original plan had been to fill a 'dead space' of a pedestrian underpass with beeswax; in the event a mould of the space - a wedge 10 metres long and 2 metres high - was made and filled with tallow. The wedge was subsequently cut into blocks - though the hardening process took longer than expected - and presumably, 40 years later, they remain susceptible to changes in ambient temperature.
From the Hamburger Bahnhof we walked to, and crossed, the Spree, past the new buildings for the Chancellery (Bundeskanzleramt) designed by Charlotte Frank and Axel Schultes, past the Reichstag, the Brandenburger Tor, through the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (designed by Peter Eisenman and Burro Happolt, past Michael Wilford's dramatic building for the British Embassy, and onto Unter der Linden.

On Unter der linden we visited the Deutsche Bank KunstHalle to see “…..Höhere Wesen befehlen”: Works on Paper from the Frider Burda Collection. This featured work by Willem de Kooning, Georg Baselitz, Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, Neo Rauch and Arnulf Rainer. In each case the artists were represented by a single 'exemplary' painting and a set of drawings. (Watch a video of the exhibition.)

Gerhard Richter, 3.5.88, 1988

Arnulf Rainer, Profil oder Palletenwurm, 1977

Also while on Unter der Linden we visited Bebelplatz - the site of one of the Nazi's book burnings, now memorialised by the Empty Library  by Micha Ullman: a glass plate set into the cobbles looking into a room of empty shelves, big enough to hold the estimated 20,000 burned books. (Our view was not as clear as this photograph shows despite Jack's heroic efforts to clean the muddy window!)

Also on Unter der Linden we dropped into the 'Neue Wache', the sublime neo-classical  memorial to victims of war, by Karl Friedrich Schinkel: the interior is an austere, plain but beautiful space containing only Käthe Kollwitz's Mother with her Dead Son and lit by a central, circular opening in the ceiling. 

Heading north, we visited a number of galleries on Auguststrasse, the most interesting of which was the Alfred Ehrhardt Foundation which featured an exhibition of dramatic landscape photographs by Jörn Vanhöfen.

Jörn Vanhöfen, Grande Dixence #413, 2013

Jörn Vanhöfen,Gotthard #45, 2014

Finally, and one of the highlights of the week*, we visited the Boros Collection. This is a private collection of contemporary art housed in the extraordinary 'Bunker'. This five storey, concrete structure was built in 1942 as an air-raid shelter to accommodate up to 3,000 people, and is said to have walls up to 2 metres thick. After the war it served as a warehouse and in the 1990s as a Techno club and venue for fetish parties. Christian Boros acquired it in 2003, installed a penthouse on its roof and his art collection in the building. The current display was first presented in 2012 and is the second to be shown. Artists include a few names familiar to me - Ai Weiwei, Olafur Eliasson, Roman Ondák, Thomas Ruff, Thomas Scheibitz, Wolfgang Tillmans, Cerith Wyn Evans  - but most were not: Awst & Walther, Dirk Bell, Cosima von Bonin, Marieta Chirulescu, Thea Djordjadze, Alicja Kwade, Klara Lidén, Florian Meisenberg, Stephen G. Rhodes, Michael Sailstorfer, Tomás Saraceno, Danh Vo, Thomas Zipp. Of these, the most exciting discovery for me was Alicja Kwade.

Alicja Kwade

Alicja Kwade

Thomas Ruff

Thomas Scheibitz

Michael Sailstorfer

Ai Weiwei

Danh Vo

Cerith Wyn Evans

*Thanks to Nick for organising the visit to the Boros Collection. 
See Postcard 1, below. 

Postcard from Berlin, 1. (Inc. East Side Gallery and the Jewish Museum)

The Fernsehturm and Marienkirche, Alexanderplatz

Day one, in Berlin (with Fine Art students and staff* from the University of Gloucestershire) began with a walk through the old Jewish areas of Mitte to see Karl Biedermann's 1996 bronze sculpture,  Der verlassene Raum (The Deserted Room) in Koppenplatz. The slightly oversized table and chairs (one overturned), ringed by a poem by Nelly Sachs is a memorial to the families who fled their homes as the Nazis attacked during Kristallnacht (9-10 November 1938).

Nearby, in Grosse Hamburger Strasse, site of the Jewish Cemetery, is The Missing House by Christian Boltanski. A gap in the houses was created by allied bombing on 3 February 1945. Boltanski has mounted 12 plaques onto the facing walls of the surviving buildings on either side of the gap showing the names, occupations and dates of residency of the people who had lived in the bombed apartments.

Amongst the cobbles of Grosse Hamburger Strasse (and many other streets in Berlin and other cities) are rather wonderful 'Stolpersteine' ('stumbling blocks') - the work of Gunther Denmig. These modest, brass-faced, cobble-stone sized, concrete blocks memorialize individual victims of the Nazis at the places where they lived. In the picture, below, for example, the top right Stolperstein reads "Here lived Wolf Segal, born 1873, deported 1943, murdered in Auschwitz."

Our walk took us to Hackescher Markt from where we caught an S-Bahn to Ostbahnhof which is a short walk from the East Side Gallery, the spectacularly painted 1.3km long remnant of the Berlin Wall.

A ride on the U-Bahn from Schlesisches Tor, and a short walk, led us to the Jewish Museum. Daniel Liebskind's extraordinary extension to the museum was completed in 1999. Liebskind's building appears to be detached from the older buiding to which it is an extension; it also has no visible entrance. Visitors must enter through the old building and via an underground passage - a metaphor for the difficulty of entering into the troubled history represented in the museum. The extension is in the form of a zig-zag - apparently a "dislocated Star of David... that is visible only from the air" (see Jacobson). However, I found that I had little sense of the shape of the building from inside it.

The most dramatic and affecting features are the 'Holocaust Tower' and the installation Fallen Leaves in the 'Memory Void'.  You enter the Holocaust Tower through a heavy door and find yourself in a bare concrete space, some 79 feet high, lit only by a narrow window slit; it is cold and dark; the walls converge into a narrow space into which visitors disappear. It is very powerful.
Empty spaces, or Voids, are built into the museum. One of these, the Memory Void, contains an installation called Shalekhet (Fallen Leaves) by Menashe Kadishman: it comprises 10,000 faces punched into steel plates covering the floor, many layers deep. Visitors walk across the uneven surface of faces causing the steel plates to clang. Also very powerful.

A short distance from the Jewish Museum on Lindenstrasse is Galerienhaus a building housing 11 contemporary art galleries. Notable amongst the exhibitions showing at the time of our visit were Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart (1899-1962) at Galerie Berinson and a group exhibition, Gathered Fates at Galerie Nordenhake. This latter show, curated by Ignasi Aballi, took its theme from a video by Sofia Hultén, Altered Fates, which is a delightful exercise in pointlessness - we watch the artist select objects or materials from a skip, alter them, and throw them back into the skip.

Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart, Composition No.41, 1927

Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart, Untitled, c1924

Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart, Composition No.75, 1933

Sofia Hultén, Altered Fates, 2013

Installation view of Gathered Fates at Galerie Nordenhake

Ceal Floyer, Garbage Bag, 1996

Click on images to enlarge.
*Special thanks to Jack and Abbie for organising the trip.

Morris & Warhol - Modern Art Oxford

Andy Warhol and William Morris

Love Is Enough: William Morris & Andy Warhol, curated by Jeremy Deller is at Modern Art Oxford until 8 March 2015.
I love Andy Warhol (see below); I love William Morris; I am also a bit of a fan of Jeremy Deller (see below). So I was pretty excited by the prospect of this exhibition. (With another of my heroes, William Blake, the subject of an exhibition at the Ashmolean (see below) a visit to Oxford was irresistable.)
Broadly, the premise for this suprising pairing of artists is that they both employed printmaking processes in collaborative factory production systems as a means to extend and  distribute their art; they both employed repetition as a design principle; they both used flower imagery and made pictures of cultural heroes and myths; the show even tries to argue that Warhol's politics had some affinity with Morris' socialism.
However, I don't think it works: there are a few terrific pieces in the exhibition, but the juxtapositions are, too often, painful clashes rather than complementary contrasts. Two of Warhol's Electric Chair screenprints on a background of Morris' densely patterned wall paper does neither artist a favour. Generally, I think that Warhol is the loser in this contest: Morris' dense, highly crafted designs make Warhol's casual elegance look lightweight and thin. But it's an unfair contest - the earnest sincerity and idealism of Morris' nostalgic vision sits awkwardly with Warhol's ironic detachment. The fact that they both made wallpaper isn't enought to make them brothers in art. (In fact Morris and William Blake would make a much more sympathetic pairing;  the Blake show, incidentally, is excellent.)

Read reviews by Waldemar Januszczak, Richard Dorment (he hated it!) and Farah Nayeri. Click on images to enlarge.

William Morris, printed fabric design: Kennet, 1883

William Morris, wall paper design: Acanthus, 1879

William Morris, wall paper: Acanthus, 1879

William Morris, 'Kelmscott Chaucer', 1896

William Morris, bound pamphlet: How I Became a Socialist, 1896

Andy Warhol, Elizabeth Taylor, 1967

Andy Warhol, Electric Chair, 1971

Andy Warhol, Flowers, 1970

Andy Warhol, Cow wallpaper, 1971

Love is Enough... installation featuring Andy Warhol, Marilyn Tapestry, 1968 and photograph of Shirley Temple (1941) from Warhol's collection, on wallpaper by William Morris

Love is Enough... installation