Made in Berlin
October 2007
“The moment the Berlin Wall came crashing down in 1989, art galleries began going up,” recallsOliver Zabel, 36, an artist and the director of the Rossella Junck Gallery in the burgeoning art district of Auguststrasse. “Now galleries from all over the world want in on Berlin.”With reunification more or less complete, Berlin’s transformation into culture-business central is going full blast. “Two galleries open here for each one closing,” notes Zabel. Art Forum Berlin, which began more than a decade ago and occurs each October, is a significant driver of international art tourism, fueling the land rush for art spaces, mostly in East Berlin.
“The East Berliners were dying for color,” says Gloria Zein, 37, an artist who had her first one-person show at Rossella Junck in June. “They splashed red and yellow and orange and green and blue all over their drab apartment buildings. The art world followed soon after.”
Berlin’s story is one of “tipping point” growth, a perfect storm of a rapidly rising international art market, cheap studios, cheap rents for galleries, a plethora of bars and clubs and thousands of artists. With more than 400 art galleries, there is inevitable yearning as well; the visitor can’t help but notice the “When will I be famous?” graffiti throughout Berlin’s art quarters—Auguststrasse, Zimmerstrasse, Brunnenstrasse, Janovitzbrücke and the newest art hotspot, Kolonie Wedding; it’s both a legitimate question and a cynical one—and an artwork itself.
A stone’s throw from the one-time Checkpoint Charlie is the Zimmerstrasse, often crowded with tourists snapping pictures of themselves with sandbags or shopping for souvenirs of Russian caps and U.S. Army helmets. Here, a dozen galleries offer a range of contemporary art. The spaces are museum-like and the offerings are dynamic, such as the wind- and motor-propelled sculptures by Roman Signer at Galerie Barbara Weiss. Among the best known is Arndt & Partner, one of the first galleries to plant a stake in Berlin. In the vast Chelsea-sized spaces of its third Berlin location, Arndt & Partner regularly runs two simultaneous exhibitions. This past spring you could have gotten lost in Thomas Hirschhorn’s installation “Stand-alone.” Consisting of furniture wrapped in the artist’s signature packaging tape, endless piles of books, violent images taken from the Internet, computers taped to the walls and giant cardboard columns that angled through each room, the work is overwhelming. Destined for a museum, it is being offered for more than $450,000. Upstairs, the fare was bit lighter: “The Aggression of Beauty II,” a show of gallery artists including Wim Delvoye’s “Donata,” 2005, a stuffed tattooed pig contemplating a work of art.
Eigen + Art is another gallery pioneer. Located on Auguststrasse, perhaps the most developed art quarter—the “Mitte’s Art Mile”—the gallery’s roots are in Leipzig, where dealer Gerd Harry Lybke helped launch the brilliant careers of some of Berlin’s most visible stars, most notably Neo Rauch. The Leipzig-based artist, who recently enjoyed a retrospective at New York’s Metropolitan Museum and whose mysterious canvases of 1950s quasi-advertising/scientific images now sell for upwards of $1 million, is almost single-handedly responsible for returning painting to the art world and for bringing Berlin to the international scene. (The gallery arrived in Berlin in 1992). Eigen + Art’s spring exhibition of Birgit Brenner featured a giant “Hollywood”-style sign made of cardboard stretched through the expanse of the gallery shouting “HEUTE NICHT” (“NOT TODAY”). “I think art history is being made in my gallery,” Lybke modestly told Taschen Books.
Created in 1990 to celebrate the collapse of the Berlin Wall, East Side Gallery contains one of the few surviving pieces of the Wall.
Auguststrasse offers a range of art spaces with a local profile, including the Kunst-Werke collective, a cultural mecca and art school with a full program of films and visual art. Next door you can find quirky spaces such as the bunker-like Neues Problem with its papered-over walls, and this past spring, an installation of trains and architectural models in half-light separated by a plastic garbage bag from a series of artists’ books sitting on a wood shelf. Neues Problem’s mission is to “try to do something without money,” says artist Uwe Jonas, who started it in 2003. “It’s the history of Berlin,” he adds with a laugh. “And sometimes I even sell things.” Jonas can always take a break in the nearby outdoor garden at Clärchens Ballhaus, a 1919 dance hall and theater turned into a successful local hangout.
Across town on the Brunnenstrasse, a number of new galleries are garnering international attention. Among them are Amerika, Martin Mertens, the experimental Artnews Projects, transplanted New Yorker Sarah Belden’s Curators Without Borders and the Berlin extension of Chelsea gallery Goff + Rosenthal. Amerika was launched by Sebastian Klemm, 30, and a number of artists who hired him as a “producer,” and the storefront gallery’s smooth cement floors and cutting-edge stable of artists quickly made it a must-see space. “We’re now showing our core group of artists at Art Forum Berlin and looking at other fairs,” says Klemm.
Pierogi Flatfiling, based in Brooklyn, dropped into the city with its cabinets in tow and had a full house at its May opening in collaboration with space owner Artnews Projects. “We basically rolled into Brunnenstrasse and set up shop to a full-capacity opening,” says Leif Magne Tangen, Leipzig director of Pierogi. Works were pinned to the wall salon-style, and sales were very strong. After an afternoon on Brunnenstrasse, Berliners climb up a small hill through a leafy park to Nola’s, a Swiss-style bar and restaurant that overlooks this hot art district and cool off with a glass of Berliner Kindl Weisse.
And galleries are not alone in capitalizing on the city’s momentum. “All the auction houses have moved into Berlin,” says Ruth Baljöhr, specialist in 15th- to 19th-century prints, drawings and paintings at Galerie Bassenge. “The most visible auction house is Villa Grisebach, which offers classical and Modernist works as well as photography, with a bustling department in contemporary art,” she says. “But everyone—Sotheby’s and Christie’s included—has set up some kind of office here. Berlin is way too important now to skip.”
Berlin has embraced contemporary art as a way to define itself. Take a look at the graffiti’d-over Tacheles, a mad series of artist-made rooms in an old ruin on the Oranienburger Strasse; “tacheles” is an old Yiddish word for “disclose,” and indeed the open bombed-out aesthetics does just that and more and is also a great place to have a beer and browse the art store there.
The Wall itself is still on display at the always-open East Side Gallery Berlin Wall museum in front of the Ostbahnhof, bordering a “beach” and hip bars along the Spree River waterfront.
At the small AnyWay Gallery on Boxhagenerstrasse, a performance artist danced in and out of a blue plastic garbage bag; an earlier exhibition at this tiny space run by Maud Piquon had yet another performance artist curled up in the storefront’s vitrine. Pretty much anything and everything is now on view in Berlin. The city is wide open for business.
Matthew Rose, Art&Antiques’ Paris correspondent, is both an artist and writer. He has written about art, culture and business for Entrée, The New York Times and The New York Times Magazine, among others.
MUSEUM ISLAND
Berlin’s national museums are world-class and situated mainly on the remarkably beautiful Museumsinsel (Museum Island). You can spend days wandering from one museum to another. See the Pergamon Museum for classical and ancient art, the recently renovated Bode for sculpture collections and late Antique and Byzantine art and the Alte Nationalgalerie to get your fill of Caspar David Friedrich. If you want to see classic Old Masters, visit the Gemäldegalerie at the Kulturforum Potsdamer Platz. The Hamburger Bahnhof is the place for modern and contemporary works by artists from the second half of the 20th century.
The Neue Nationalgalerie, housed in Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s last building, off Potsdamer Platz, has a sensational collection of modern and contemporary art.
At the Martin-Gropius-Bau is an exhibition by Eugène Atget (1857–1927) (through January) celebrating the photographer’s birth 150 years ago.
Need a Bauhaus fix? There’s the Bauhaus Archive, located just south of the Tiergarten. Here, Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius’ late masterpiece, a Berlin landmark houses the finest collection of Bauhaus material in changing thematic exhibitions. Helmut Newton Foundation near the Zoologischergarten features work by the late photographer, his wife, June (a.k.a. Alice Springs), and other photographers and artists.
And just outside of Berlin in the quaint Grunewald district is the Brücke Museum celebrating its 40th anniversary as a home for expressionist art.
IN BED WITH ART AND COMMERCE
Even while you sleep, there’s art in Berlin. The 10-year-old Arte Luise Kunsthotel in Berlin’s Mitte, across from the Spree River and the Reichstag Building, is a former East Berlin artist hotel that offered ateliers for struggling painters and sculptors during the Communist era.
“We started out with 11 rooms, coal heating and one show,” says co-founder Mike Buller, with a laugh. “Artists were living and working here, and one artist set up his room rather nicely; other artists rapidly followed suit. It was a tug-of-war between the new capitalist Germany and the old Socialist one.” Now art and commerce sleep together in some 48 rooms, some with sock sculptures climbing the walls and others with a 2-meter-long bird beak over the bed. New groups of artists come in every two to three years to design the rooms; the lobby shows off a range of works, including a giant camel’s nose and the painted stripes by Markus Linnenbrink. “Elvira Bach’s wall painting in Room 101 is reportedly worth about $132,000,” says Buller, who pays the artists a commission each time guests stay in their rooms. Plus, visitors are encouraged to visit the artists’ studios. (Dieter Finke has sold quite a few sculptures out of Room 104.) The Kunsthotel’s “Kunst” rooms are usually full, particularly during the Art Forum Berlin fair (luise-berlin).
In need of a nightcap? Next door to the Kunsthotel, there’s Habel Weinkultur, a wine bar and restaurant established in 1779, where sommelier Steven Kelly will fetch you a 2000 La Tâche, Grand Cru Domaine de la Romané from its 3,000-bottle cellar.
If an artist hotel is not your preference, purchase a copy of Berlin Hotels & More (Taschen, Köln, Germany; taschen.com), which provides a sumptuous guide, including upscale resting spots and watering holes like the Savoy Hotel and the
super-modern Hotel Q.
BERLIN ITINERARY
►Amerika
Brunnenstrasse 7
011.49.30.4050.4953
www.amerika-berlin.de
►Art News Projects
Brunnenstrasse 190
011.49.30.2790.7810
►Berlin Museums
www.smb.spk-berlin.de/e
►Berlin Tourist TV
www.visitberlin.tv
►Brücke Museum
Bussardsteig 9
011.49.3.0831.2029
www.bruecke-museum.de
►Curators Without Borders
Bussardsteig 5
011.49.30.4050.0548
www.curatorswithoutborders.com
►Galerie Bassenge Fine Art and Book Auctions
Erdener Stasse 5a
011.49.8.93.80.29.22
www.bassenge.com
►Gallery Guide
www.indexberlin.de
►Goff + Rosenthal
Brunnenstrasse 3
011.49.30.4373.5083
www.goffandrosenthal.com
►Helmut Newton Foundation
Jebensstrasse 2
011.49.30.3186.4856
www.helmutnewton.com
►Kunst Werke Institute for Contemporary Art
011.49.30.2434.5941
www.kw-berlin.de
►Tacheles
Oranienburgerstr 54–56-A
011.49.3.0282.6185
www.tacheles.de
►Tourism
www.visitberlin.de