Agathe Snow: All Access World
28 January – 30 March 2011
Deutsche Guggenheim
www.deutsche-guggenheim.de

Agathe Snow is a beloved New Yorker but her culturally critical assemblage and collage typify Berlin’s feral signature style. In “All Access World,” Snow focuses on Berlin’s rigorous but healthy rumination on its own history, memories and monuments. In her extensively researched collages and drawings, she re-imagines world landmarks as utopian sites for cross-cultural exchange. Her first solo show at the Deutche Guggenheim spearheads a trend for multi-media work reveling in philosophical and stylishic clashes. This month includes a wave of shows sampling, re-contextualizing and appropriating everyday objects, other artists’ work or even an artist’s own famous projects. Snow’s thoughtful but playful exhibition is the best starting-point for this series of shows around the city.

Patterns of Intention: Ruth Buchanan / Jennifer Cohen / Aleana Egan / Fredrik Værslev
5 February–12 March 2011
Circus Galerie
www.circusberlin.de

The four international artists in “Patterns of Intention” innovatively critique architecture’s conventions. Norwegian artist Fredrik Værslev’s “terrazzo paintings” are created through the layering of marble chips, concrete powdering, goat’s milk, water and a final sanding required to create the classic terrazzo décor technique. New Zealander Ruth Buchanan’s text-based audio piece ‘Build a wall or be a Room’ is a playful satire of architecture’s academic language. Irish artist Aleana Egan investigates architecture conventions in her sculptures of mundane interior details, like doors and windows. And although Brooklyn-based artist Jennifer Cohen uses paper pulp, cement, clay, bronze to comment on the conventions of classical dance training, instead of architecture, her work joins the rest in questioning our use and understand of space.

Öyvind Fahlstom
19 February – 21 April 2011
Aurel Scheibler / Scheibler Mitte
www.aurelscheibler.com

The intricate drawings and colorful paintings of late Brazilian artist Öyvind Axel Christian Fahlström illustrate the extensive scope of his intellectual activities. Fahlström began his career as a critic and journalist in the 1930s. He only began exhibiting art in the 50s yet his work expresses a delightfully child-like curiosity and resounding humor that remain fresh decades after his untimely death.

Thilo Heinzmann
22 February – 2 April 2011
Galerie Guido W. Baudach Wedding
www.guidowbaudach.com

Soft color dusting and warm gradations between pink, red and white produce the fleshy texture of Thilo Heinzmann’s tender abstract canvases. The German painter has a remarkably soft touch. His brush is loving and gentle. The results are sensual yet ethereal. These light paintings are a direct and compelling contrast to his sculptural interventions into canvas which include splicing and stabbing the actual fabric or covering the canvas in warped bunches of resin-soaked cloth. Joining together these separate practices is his obvious interest in the process of painting and its manifold emotional and structural possibilities.

Anton Henning: Stilfragenv- Questions of Style
26 February – 20 April 2011
Arndt
www.arndtberlin.com

Anton Herring is apprehensive about being categorized. He rejects tight definitions, preferring open-ended experimentation and free forms. The Manker-based artist cherry-picks apparently disparate references from art history and re-organizes them in his extensive and expansive array of mediums. Yet his paintings are possibly the most intriguing demonstration of his love of disruption and appropriation. His large oil-paintings are dotted with bubble-like forms adding the illusion of texture and stylistic confusion to his Modernist allusions.

Deborah Ligorio
All’Orizzonte degli Eventi
11 March – 18 April 2009
Sommer & Kohl
www.sommerkohl.com

Italian conceptual sculptor and video artist Deborah Ligorio employs charm and obvious intellectual curiosity to investigate the relationship between space and feelings. She strives to explore metaphysical concerns with odd-beat, lyrical multi- media work ranging from collage to custom-build “living units.” Her concerns are expansive but she handles them with a witty, light, touch.

Nicky Broekhuysen: Between States, Into Light
12 March – 23 April, 2011
pool gallery
www.pool-gallery.com

Nicky Broekhuysen creates compelling shades of gray using only two simple stamps on paper, signifying the extremes of binary code. She juxtaposes the arrangements of 1 and 0 stamps into geometric forms which resemble exploding stars or planets being formed. These basic shapes and her restricted vocabulary successfully enable her to express her ideas about the constant interplay of order and chaos in our contemporary reality.

Lorna Macintyre
12 March – 16 April 2011
Galerie Kamm
www.galeriekamm.de

Lorna Macintyre’s subtle conceptual sculpture and photography is disarmingly off- kilter. The Glasgow-born and -based multi-media artist regularly references 19th-century symbolism in her gentle wood, copper, string and mirror sculptures. Her choice of materials specifically adheres to her historical source-material but also quietly evokes a philosophical relationship between man and nature, memory and faith.

John Kissick: Groovefucker
25 March – 5 May 2011
Wilde Gallery
www.wilde-gallery.com

John Kissick’s oil and acrylic paintings don’t have an accessible flow. If his clashing colors and loud patterns were translated into music, it would not be an easy groove. This disjunction gives his exhibition title its punch and his art its joy. Kissick disrupts the surface of his canvases with an intense and enlivening energy akin to hardcore dance music or techno. He creates this effect by scrambling Pop Art-like commercial colors and slinky forms into his densely packed imagery.

Richrd Long: Berlin Circle
26 March – 31 July 2011
Hamburger Bahnhof
www.hamburgerbahnhof.de

Richard Long is accustomed to developing his striking minimalist sculptures in commanding outdoor settings or interior spaces. For this installation in the powerful Hamburger Bahnhof center gallery, Long will recreate his “Berlin Circle” of greenish slate assembled in a circle. The piece was originally installed in the same area in 1996 and now forms the focal point for a fresh look at the influential Land Artist.