Exhibition: Louise Bourgeois

I guess I needn't emphasize that I'm a big admirer of Louise Bourgeois' art, and I had already visited the large retrospective of her work at the Tate Modern in London in 2007. Now we had the opportunity to see the "Structures of Existence: The Cells" exhibition of her work at the Munich Haus der Kunst, suppossedly assembling "the largest number of "Cells" presented to date".
And indeed, despite that there are also other works included to the exhibit, the most intriguing works are the Cells that take up most of the room. These are closed-in rooms, often with only one short opening to view into, which have various assemblages arranged inside. One is at times reminded of Edward and Nancy Kienholz' installations (which I admire as well), but Bourgeois' Cells are clearly meant as a series and have obvious psychoanalytic and autobiographical meaning. At times they may appear riddling, but they always have a strange, and at times disturbing surreal appeal.
Luckily, the exhibition was not overcrowded, so you could take your time enjoying the individual works.

Exhibition: Schlaflos

While in Vienna we repeatedly came across a poster depicting Jürgen Teller's photo of Kate Moss with pink hair in bed and advertising an exhibition titled Schlaflos ("Sleepless"), a history of the bed in history and contemporary art, at the 21er Haus, Quartier Belvedere. At first we hadn't noticed, but the exhibition was not opened yet and was announced to begin on January 30, the day of our departure from Vienna. Luckily the 21er Haus is right around the corner from the main station, so we were able to leave our luggage at the station and had time enough to visit the exhibition before our train was scheduled.
So we visited the exhibition, which was a wildly eclectic mix of paintins, installations, photos and film of varying quality and therefore quite entertaining. And we were able to purchase the poster.
 

Exhibition: Lust am Schrecken

We visited the Lust am Schrecken ("The Delight of Fright") exhibition at the Viennese Academy of Fine Arts, a topic that held some promising options of what would be displayed.
Unfortunately, the displayed works were limited to the periods from Renaissance to Classicism, and one had the impression the curators had simply put together a selection of paintings from their archives and gave a name to it. However, there were some admirable works to be seen, and for once the exhibition was not crowded. The highlight for me was to be able to see a main work by Hieronymus Bosch A favorite artist of mine), his Weltgerichtstriptychon (The Last Judgment triptych) in detail and undisturbed by other spectators. There was also an interesting series of paintings depicting the Temptation of Saint Anthony, an oft-repeated subject in art which I have always wanted to study a bit more in depth.

Exhibition: Alberto Giacometti

We were lucky to arrive in Vienna on the very last day of the Alberto Giacometti exhibition at the Leopold Museum. It was double luck, since the museum was a just a few feet from our hotel and - entrance was free for the last day.
Since my early student years I have been an admirer of Alberto Giacometti's art ( I still have the catalogue to the 1987 Nationalgalerie Berlin retrospective), and it was therefore a special treat to see his work presented in a retrospective. This included a variety of his early minor works and that of his father plus good examples from other contemporary artists who may have influenced him.
Giacometti, of course, is famous for his long, lean sculptures: "Reduced, as they are, to their very core, these figures evoke lone trees in winter that have lost their foliage. Within this style, Giacometti would rarely deviate from the three themes that preoccupied him—the walking man; the standing, nude woman; and the bust—or all three, combined in various groupings." (Catalogue Metropolitan Museum of  Art).
My only criticism to the exhibition is that I had wished to have seen more of Giacometti's later sculptures and unfortunately, due to its popularity, the venue was overcrowded so that you had to struggle to get a view of the exhibits.

Exhibition: Sammlung Götz

This exhibition in the cellar rooms of the Munich Haus der Kunst is dedicated to the topic of "Broken, Slapstick, Comedy and Black Humor" and consists of mostly videos (there's otherwise only one installation) by various artists which very loosely fit into the given theme: Pawel Althamer, Francis Alÿs, John Bock, Olaf Breuning, Nathalie Djurberg, Peter Fischli & David Weiss, Rodney Graham, Mike Kelley, Jochen Kuhn, Mirko Martin, Aernout Mik, Tony Oursler, Paul Pfeiffer, Robin Rhode and Julian Rosefeldt.
As to be expected not much of the work is actually funny and the professional quality of these clips are quite varying as well. The only work I found intriguing was by Peter Fischli & David Weiss, but then I've always liked their art. Their well over 30 minute film "Der Lauf der Dinge" (The Way Things Go) from 1987 is a classic.

Exhibition: Victor Man - Zephyr

Victor Man received the Deutsche Bank's award for Artist of the Year in 2014 - hope that doesn't spoil his work. On this occasion the Munich Haus der Kunst is presenting his series Zephyr, miniature paintings depicting slightly Surrealist scenes spiced with some dark humor. In contrast to the other current exhibitions at the museum the hall was dimmed and small spotlights illuminated the singular works giving them  a much better presentation. The exhibition's description explains that "Victor Man's works lead viewers into a mysterious world that merges the mundane and fantastic, myth and fetish, individual experience and art historical references, the male and the female, man and beast." I can agree, but must add that there is also a sense of irony and humor even emphasized by the presentation: giant hall - very small paintings.

Exhibition: Kapsel 02: Mohamed Bourouissa

French-Algerian Mohamed Bourouissa is the second artist Munich's Haus der Kunst is presenting in their Kapsel series, a multi-media presentation dividing the one room made available for the artist into two: one presenting some simplistic scupltures and artefacts clearly with emphasis on the topic: horse. The second room is a small cinema where the artist's short documentary film Horse Day is projected. This seems to be the center of the artist's work for this project. It depicts the prepapartions and the event of a 'horse tuning' competition hosted within the small community of an American urban quarter. Although the movie uses some cinematic techniques (like a bird's eye sequence shot from a drone above the field where the horses are presented) and some scenes of dialogue may be staged, it is a cinema verite investigation of the people fancying up their horses with very primitive materials: one horse is decorated with sheets of CDs, another with silver and red stripes of tinsel, again another with cardboard affixed to the horse to represent something like flopping wings. Although it is insightful as a reflection of the nearly innocent creative fantasies of these city dwellers, I found it difficult to grasp within the context of such an 'official' context as the monumental Haus der Kunst (the first of its kind built by the Nazis). I found myself imagining the exhibition's opening evening with Munich luminaries in their dresses and suits sipping champagne and watching real people from oustide their world on the screen.

Exhibition: Kapsel 01: Tilo Schulz

The Munich Haus der Kunst is presenting young artists in a series called Kapsel. The concept is to give each artist one room in the musuem and invite them to arrange it with their work. The Berlin artist Tilo Schulz decided to create a partialized darkened room, the walls, roof and floor in black, interpersed with a few artifacts, and with a female voice reciting a text in the semidarkness. It's all quite nice, but I would have prefered to enter this tunnel-like work from darkness oustide and not from a brightened hall.

Exhibition: Georg Baselitz

My mother used to serve us what she called an upside down cake. However, since it had a topping I never really understood the term: sure it was baked upside down, but what you got on the table was an upright cake. My adolescent preference for symmetry and correct arrangement led me to determine the value of something in its result, but not how it was made. It took me quite a while to accept any imbalance (even the golden ratio was one for me) in a work of art, but over time I learnt to develop a taste for disorderliness and the aethetics of the ugly, aspects, I think, that are necessary to understand modernism. This said, I guess it's understandable that I've always had a problem with the artist Georg Baselitz and his upside down paintings. First of all, it doesn't matter to me that he paints them the way they are presented (and not upright, then turning them around); they are still slightly abstracted figurative art presented the other way around as an afterthought, a joke. Secondly, he is one of those artists I call "Hofmaler des Kapitals", capitalists' court painters, whose works are bought by banks, industrialists, multi-millionaires, etc at absurd prices. I don't consider their work to actually be the current vanguard of art, since it has become part of the big business system.
The exhibition in Munich's Haus der Kunst titled "Back then, in between and today" implies an overview of his complete œuvre, but consists of a handful of older works and the majority is all more recent. Meanwhile his upside down 'technique' has become only one aspect of his production, but he still utilizes it. I found his series of large scale paintings "Schwarze Bilder" (Black Pictures) the most intriguing, since they are very dark abstract paintings which reveal their nuances only over a longer time of viewing. They also may have been more interesting, if they had been presented in a different lighting. In this case they were in the largest hall with bright light. For the first time I got to see some of his (quite large and black) sculptures - upright for obvious reasons. Another aspect of his work are the partialized works: paintings created in stripes that in the sum seem to visualize different perceptions or visions of a theme. Finally, I did begin to appreciate the upside downs, too, if taken with a grain of humor, but I'm not sure, if they were intended to be seen that way.

Exhibition: Mobile Art

In his exhibition Christian Havlicek tries to explore the boundaries of the arts. He asks: "Is it possible to produce art with the everyday object cell phone (mobile phone)?" The guests of the interactive exhibition are invited to photograph or bring their own photos by cell phone. These will be edited at GRAZ and printed on A3.
An interesting concept with a display of the possible varieties was presented at the opening, allthough guest contributions were understandably scarce at this stage of the exhibition.

Exhibitions: Color for the Republik

Although this exhibition in the Berlin Deutsches Historisches Museum is advertized as showing 'contract photography' in the former communist German Democratic Republic, it actually contains work by 2 photographers only: Kurt Schwarzer and Martin Schmidt. Nevertheless, their photos are quite representative for the kind of insipid propaganda the former regime preferred. Although the photographers' mastery is obvious, their contract work contains the ever the same concept: a seemingly idyllic group of citizens enjoying an "accomplishment" of the socialist state. However, the photos are all eerily posed, and often reveal a bland background. Or the pose is so artificial that they become noncredible. They do remind one of similar photos from the 50s era in the West, but here the look never changed till the end of the German separation in 1989. So, instead of demonstrating any achievements or progress, the exhibition proves that the Eastern German state existed in an uncomfortable aesthetic standstill. Quite fascinating indeed.

Exhibition: World War I 1914-1918

The Berlin Deutsches Historisches Museum currently presents a large exhibition on World War I, but considering the monumentality of the topic, it is simply not large enough. For this reason the exhibition is compressed to demonstrating 14 distinctive locations around the globe and their significance for the war. Of course, it is interesting and informative, but it does appear arbitrary and the exhibited tidbits are at times clearly exemplary, others often seem to be there, because the museum had them in their archive anyway.

Exhibition Hans Richter

Hans Richter is well known to me as a revolutinary film maker; I used to give classes analyzing his films in my film club days, and we often screened his works. I didn't care much about his paintings, and the Berlin exhibition in the Martin-Gropius-Bau didn't change my mind on that aspect, although he has undoubtedly relavance within the art history of the 20th century as well, and I do like some of his collages from the Dada era. His films still compel much more and these were well represented in the exhibition.
A highlight is a documentary film screened nonstop at the show revealing his many friendships and collaboartions with almost everybody significant in the art world of the last century. His life story seems to have been adventerous, and wherever he went fleeing the Third Reich, he somehow managed to find welcome (compared to some of his fellow artists with a more tragic fate). He also was immensely productive till his death at a high age.

Exhibition: Wols

So far I had known and admired Wols as artist, but this exhibition in the Berlin Martin-Gropius-Bau shows for the very first time his work as photographer. Although I was not impressed by his portraits, his photos of street objets trouves and his still lives reveal the eye of a great artist with a sometimes macabre sense of humour.

Exhibition: Ai Weiwei

The Ai Weiwei exihibition in the Berlin Martin-Gropius-Bau is titled "Evidence" and has been described as a retrospective. However, it is a collection of most recent works of varying quality, all with a more less or less political content directed against the Chinese government. Some of them document his own imprisonment (there's a walk-in installation of his prison cell and a selection of objects from the prison like his handcuffs and clothes hangers), others imply certain events like the Sichuan earthquake (the twisted iron rods) or the conflict with Japan concerning the Diaoyu islands (a large marmor relief depicting the islands' topography). Some of this I find quite blatant, but his best works are those that have a strong aesthetic appeal and are not so easily deciphered: the 6000 wooden stools or the hanging bicyles installation.

Exhibition: David Bowie

This exhibition in the Berlin Martin-Gropius-Bau was imported from the London Victoria & Albert Museum, and there are some (mainly photographic) additions documenting his Berlin years in the 70s.
The extremely popular exhibition is appropriately well staged as an audio-visual show and successfully documents Bowie's early beginnings, the different aspects of his work, which besides music includes very much fashion, and his comprehensive interests in the culture of his time which are clearly reflected in his music and his stage shows. Very well represented are his various costumes he used over the years and his ambiguous attitude toward gender and the various roles he played in movies.
Although his latest album The Next Day finds mention, it does appear that the scope of the exhibition ends sometime around 1980. It's a bit like the meticulous collection of a fanboy, who doesn't like the stuff David Bowie did after the 70s.

Exhibition: Rembrandt Bugatti

At the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin we visited the exhibition of Rembrandt Bugatti's animal sculptures. The artist actually created these works at his frequent visits to the zoos in Paris and Antwerpen.
The sculptures are lovingly molded interpretations of the animals' typical posture, at times even humorous. However, the works are placed within the galleries of the museum's (huge) collection of paintings which made it difficult to viewing without this context.