Favorites of the week: Paradise of Sensuality – Culture

Art: Fabric sculptures by Eva Fàbregas in Berlin

A room like a fan: rousing, promising, appealing. The mighty hall of the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin has been transformed. Balls and bubbles, threads and tubes are entwined around the cold metal struts; you can see tentacles, flowers and breasts. The Catalan artist Eva Fàbregas explodes fireworks in yellow, red and pink, no: flesh-colored, in the late classicist architecture of the Prussian Friedrich Neuhaus. Soft, air-filled fabric sculptures spread across the floor and walls, sometimes vibrating in the most delicate of ways. There was no need for this expression of life; you definitely want to touch the soft curves, you want to throw yourself into them, you want to touch and be touched. At the same time, one suspects that this would not be without risk. Firstly, touching is unfortunately forbidden, and secondly, Fàbregas’ show bears the title “Devouring Lovers” (until January 14th).

In fact, the sprawling masses, all the hairy piles, strands and stalks are reminiscent not only of organs – internal organs, reproductive organs – but also of cellular beings, organisms, of plants, perhaps carnivorous ones? Fàbregas, born in Barcelona in 1988, lives in London and Barcelona, ​​and her work moves on the border between embrace and strangulation, ball pit and sex toy, temptation and disgust. It is her largest solo exhibition to date, created from her own drawings. And what can we say: a better show for this special time of year in this special mood cannot be imagined. Loneliness is a big topic these days, the triumph of artificial intelligence is just around the corner, and at the same time we are receiving unbearably cruel news from all over the world. If there is an artist who does not reconcile the opposites, but rather embraces them, makes the cold steel vibrate and creates a paradise of sensuality in the middle of January, then a visit is not only recommended, it is politically necessary. Sonja Zekri

Graphic Novel: A Storyboard for Wim Wenders

“I draw with Wim Wenders. Awesome!” In January 2014, the Canadian artist and illustrator Stéphane Lemardelé is traveling to Montreal to design the storyboard for the new film “Every Thing Will Be Fine” for Wim Wenders. Stéphane talks about this work – how the scenes are developed shot by shot, the decor is built, and finally about the shooting in Oka, Quebec, at temperatures well below zero (also about the beauty of his Canadian homeland). His comic book “The Storyboard of Wim Wenders” (Splitter, 153 pages, 29.80 euros) is an idiosyncratic document and a loving excursion into the world of Wim Wenders, about his views on cinema, on the future of images and stories and films – you can study it well with Wenders’ new film “Perfect Days”, which is currently in cinemas. “It’s impossible to live without stories; they make life bearable.” Fritz Goettler

Photo book: Audrey Hepburn in all her beauty

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If sometimes the familiar promises comfort, what could offer more comfort than a photo book about Audrey Hepburn? We already know that there are practically no bad recordings of her. And even if you’ve seen the best ones a thousand times – when you leaf through them you’re immediately transported back to a distant, fairytale-like time. Since this year, the publisher ACC Art Books from tranquil Woodbridge in Suffolk has been selling its great books in Germany, in the original – and this British perspective continues in “Always Audrey” (ACC Art Books, 288 pages, 44.99 euros). different accents. For example, there is an early still photo from the film “Laughter in Paradise”, London 1951, in which the then unknown Hepburn can be seen for less than a minute as “Cigarette Girl”. Black dress as a work uniform, belly drawers, huge white bows in the hair – you can see that the film will one day be forgotten, but Hepburn and this photo will not.

You could see it back then too: the magazine ABC Movie Review The stranger promptly printed the two script sentences on the cover. Which once again leads to the realization that star quality in special cases is not a matter of opinion. That same year, the famous French writer Colette happened to take a look at the young actress and declared that only this girl could embody her novel’s heroine “Gigi” on Broadway – and that’s what happened. And during this “Gigi” production, the first iconic series of images of her, shown in full here, were created. The young, aspiring photographers of that time, all of whom would then become stars in their profession, are brought together in the book: Lawrence Fried, Norman Parkinson, Milton H. Greene, Douglas Kirkland, Terry O’Neill. And at the end, like a kind of coda, there are the five shots that Eva Sereny was able to take in 1989 on the set of Steven Spielberg’s “Always”, Hepburn’s last film appearance. There she is friendly and present, but she already has more than one leg in eternity. And wears a white sweater that is actually only given to angels – as otherworldly and fluffy as it shines. Tobias Kniebe

Music biography: the pianist Chen Pi-hsien

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A gifted pianist from Taiwan has been living in Germany, the music paradise, for decades, whose name was not known to many classical music aficionados, but to the “connoisseurs”. How can that be? Perhaps because Pi-hsien Chen never subjected her music-making to the dictates of a career, the returns of fame. Because she went her own way with her musicality. Or because it places the “Goldberg Variations” and the sonatas of Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert just as deeply as the tricky avant-garde of Pierre Boulez, John Cage or Karlheinz Stockhausen. The author Michaela Fridrich has succeeded in portraying the pianist in her paperback at edition text + kritik; she calls her a “key researcher between worlds”. It is hardly surprising that Pi-hsien Chen was not satisfied with an early triumph: in 1972, at the age of 21, she won the extremely tough ARD International Music Competition in Munich.

Anyone who still believes Michel de Montaigne’s old knowledge to be true today, such as the sentence “Our search can find no end”, can have an adventurous life. Pi-hsien Chen comes to Cologne from Taipei as a very talented nine-year-old and becomes a student, even daughter, in the house of her new piano professor. The artistic development, with personal crises, is rapid. At 17 she studied with the legendary Russian Tatjana Nikolajewa, at 19 she practiced Beethoven with master Wilhelm Kempff in Positano and learned from Claudio Arrau and Hans Leygraf. Pi-hsien Chen wins competitions, plays in London and Washington, travels to Asia and Latin America, becomes a professor in Cologne and later in Freiburg. She has been a German citizen since 1975.

The lucid vastness of her mind is striking, the desire to connect the old with the new, the near with the far throughout the centuries of music history. In the book, Pi-hsien Chen appears, also in dialogues with the author, as the musician who balances her limitless curiosity with the elegance of spontaneous thinking. Even more profound than her artistic knowledge and skills is her “radical devotion to music.” And Pi-hsien Chen always has to wonder: “The greatest composers lived in Germany.” Wolfgang Schreiber

Pop: the list of lists

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The leading pop star of the year was without a doubt Taylor Swift, 26 billion streams of her songs also made her the “Global Artist 2023” on the world’s largest music streaming platform. The world’s most listened to song of the year on Spotify is “Flowers” by Miley Cyrus, with 1.6 billion streams. High score pop records of this kind only reflect the unmistakable. Traditionally, the various critics and audience lists from media outlets like the British one are more interesting Guardian, Wiredem Rolling Stones or Pitchfork.com. If you want it even more convenient, go to the “List aggregate” on the site Albumoftheyear.org advised, the list that collects all pop lists and creates the meta ranking. The album of the year 2023 is “The Record” by Boygenius, and the top five is also the great new album “Javelin” by Sufjan Stevens. The most appreciated song of the year is Lana Del Rey’s “A & W”, but the lower places also promise real discoveries. Jens Christian Rabe