February 12th, 2010 - The Berlin Scene.

Hi blog followers, This post will be dedicated to the very small portion of the Berlin art scene that I was able to see during my 48 hours in that fine city last weekend. And it will be quite short too, because I'm busy with finishing up the semester and developing a new photography project.

Once this project has become a bit more solidified, will share it with you here. I'm quite excited about this new work although it's a fairly dramatic change compared to my previous work. But that's what art graduate school is for, right?.

But back to Berlin, a city with far to large an art scene to explore given the miniscule amount of time I had there. For those of you not in the know, apparently Berlin is 'the scene' these days. It is attracting huge numbers of artists becuase it's relatively affordable enormous city; hipster paradise.

My plans to explore this side of the city didn't go exactly as planned. In fact, I didn't even have time to make it to the exhibition that was my excuse to make the excursion... TransMedial (www.transmediale.de), an exhibition of 'art and digital culture." Since I didn't make it to this show, I don't even know quite what that means.

Instead I spent time with an old school mate and current Bard College Painting MFA candidate, Eric Legris. And because Eric is a painter who really likes painting, we spent a lot of time looking at paintings...

The first exhibition of the evening was at Kavi Gupta Gallery's new Berlin extension. The main gallery is actually in Chicago... and after having a project space in Leipzig for a while, they decided to move their German presence to Berlin a few months ago.

So we began with the Paintings of Patrick Alt, a young German artist (b. 1976). These large paintings were shown in the intimate gallery:

Aside from the paintings, there were several ironing boards set at different heights throughout the gallery. They had blue and yellow patterns on them with small bits of paint -- mainly the artist's initals backwards: AP. This is how Patrick used to write his initials when he was young, and they happen to be his girlfriend's initials too.

We then went to Thomas Eggerer exhibition at Galerie Daniel Buchholz, although it includes drawings and collage as well the paintings. The work looked something like this (although I'm told it was more impressive in person, to painters at least):

We edned up at an opening at Autocenter. Autocenter is a large exhibition space on the edge of Berlin, and they were celebrating their 100th exhibition with a group show that included all sorts of media. Even a few photographs.

They certainly know how to throw a party there. And there was a lot of good work. I'm told that much of it was fairly atypical for the artists showing, but as I didn't know any of the artists, that was news to me. Unfortunately, their website isn't particularly helpful.

On Saturday I never even made it to the first exhibition at Max Hans Daniel, three young Germany curators who seem to focus on hot NYC artists. They've been curating exhibitions together for a while now, and having finally opened their own space to show work.

Instead, I spent Saturday painting one of my photographs with my friend Eric. His paintings of one of my new photo were just put up in a show at The Forgotten Bar Project Space. Stop by and take a look if you're in the neighborhood.

A version he helped me paint will be part of my end of the semester exhibition in a few weeks. Hanging with my photograph on top of it. But now I need to get busy preparing work for said exhibition...

Ciao for now... Todd.