Gallery Weekend Berlin 2022 – Culture

Currywurst and champagne. This is not only a surprisingly convincing combination, especially in the particularly sensitive hours between midnight and sunrise. This is actually the only culinary achievement in Berlin that has so far been able to impress internationally, not least in the international art scene. Even the most lyrical Biennale curators from Italy have been seen here in disbelief, but increasingly enthusiastically, as sausages from the deep fryer are washed down with sparkling wine twenty times the price. It’s all a matter of time. And then the most famous of these stalls is also called “Bier’s”, is located directly on the Ku’damm and has a little sausage with wings as its logo. Can you believe it?

John Armleder, the now 73-year-old conceptual artist from Switzerland, always found this so delightful when he visited Berlin that he just elevated the winged currywurst to a work of art for the “Gallery Weekend”. As a neon sculpture as well as a mural, it now floats through the latest gallery spaces by Mehdi Chouakri, who, with all his French elegance, personally represents the champagne to go with it, so to speak. Armleder may not even be aware of how deeply he is touching on the city’s psychogeography. The very old West Berliners say that since the trauma of the Berlin blockade, i.e. the Soviet attempt to starve people in 1948, they felt it psychologically imperative that there was a sausage stand in sight at all times and everywhere – quality didn’t matter, the main thing was that the calories were up Warehouse. That is the existential core of the matter, so to speak, the rest is frosting from the Remmidemmi years with Harald Juhnke and David Bowie. In any case, it’s no wonder that this whole Berlin currywurst myth plays much less of a role in the eastern part of the city.

The tour becomes a round trip, even a crematorium is now on the course

In the economic geography of the city, the eastern part has long played the role of supplier of atmospherically interesting open spaces close to the city center, which artists and galleries like to settle in, but for whom they have often become far too unaffordable. Years ago, Chouakri preferred to move back to bourgeois Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf because the historic slums of Mitte are now the most expensive in the whole city. His newest rooms are now in the Wilhelm Halls up in Reinickendorf. Gallery Weekend audiences have never had to travel so far to the outskirts to see art. On the other hand, it also sees the Wilhelminian industrial complex high in the north, where artists’ studios are housed today, since there is hardly anything to be found within the S-Bahn ring.

The tour will be at this Gallery Weekend this finally leads to the tour, and those who want art can also get a lesson in urbanism at the same time. Even Wedding’s crematorium is now on the course. The Ebensperger gallery is showing Otto Muehl, among others, for whom one could hardly imagine a more suitable destination.

In addition to new rooms, old masters are the real theme of this weekend in Berlin. Of course, there are also the young masters and the possibly big names of tomorrow, for example the 27-year-old Ser Serpas at Barbara Weiss. But if you want, you can also look at many big names from yesterday or even the day before in Berlin galleries: From Horst Antes (Galerie Friese) to John Zurier (Nordenhake). The Konrad Fischer Galerie is once again showing its superstar Bruce Nauman, this time Dittrich & Schlechtriem even have Albrecht Dürer and Francisco de Goya on the list. But the oldest living artist is presented by the youngest Berlin gallery. This is the American Joan Jonas, now 85 years old.

Decades ago, when Jonas lived in Berlin-Tiergarten for a while and possibly even ate her currywurst with champagne, she was always a bit surprised at the many aimless women standing around on Kurfürstenstrasse near Potsdamer. At least that’s what the gallery owner Pauline Seguin tells, who recently opened a shop on this very Kurfürstenstraße under the beautiful name “Heidi” has opened – with a direct view through panoramic glass panes of the best known (cf. “Christiane F. – Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo”), at the same time the most depressing drug strip in the country. Today it only exists in remnants, but even those are a hard dose Social realism made up of the smell of urine, underage pimps without front teeth and collapsed miserable prostitutes.Where practically everything pulls you down, Pauline Seguin now lets jolly paper kites by Joan Jonas soar to the ceiling of a former furniture store to compensate.

Open detailed view

A symbol for the general movement in the area here? As far as the rental prices on Potsdamer Strasse are concerned, unfortunately yes. One can already hear that many of Berlin’s recently formed gallery clusters will soon no longer be able to afford them. And then you have to go further down, to where the Potsdamer turns into the main street and where the grandiose costume shop “Deko-Behrendt” was for as long as anyone can remember. In the overcrowded labyrinth, carnival and Halloween coincided all year round, even rubber masks with the face of Kim Jong-un were found there. Then the operators used the pandemic to escape to well-deserved retirement, and now the shows Gallery Chertludde in the swept-out rooms at least reminiscences of the previous tenants: Petrit Halilaj and Alvaro Urbano present decollages made from the found decorative material, and Annette Frick shows photos from the Schöneberg trans scene, which in the nineties also liked to dress up at Deko-Behrendt.

Upper class apartments and drug streets, is there a more stark contrast imaginable? Always in Berlin

Jump into the apartment in the old building on Charlottenburger Kaiserdamm, to which the photo gallery Kicken has now moved in Mitte after all these years: it is definitely a upper-class apartment that you can just visit at the moment, a former milk bottle manufacturer’s apartment, as you learn, a of those endless Berlin flats that you basically need a bicycle for, and before the war it is said to have been twice as big. The strict seventies conceptualist Klaus Rinke is now being honored there again. Can you think of a more blatant contrast to Seguin’s shop on the drug street? Always in Berlin. For example, the military garage landscape of the former GDR government motor pool outside in Lichtenberg, where the Haubrok Collection also shows works by Klaus Rinke.

So you could hunt right through the big city until the end of this text and look at a total of 52 galleries. But that’s not possible, because this urgently needs to be reported: Overall, the Berlin galleries have come through the pandemic happily well, thanks to state aid, also thanks to the saved trade fair costs, and new ones have even opened like “Heidi” by Pauline Seguin, who was previously with Gavin Brown in New York, a much more merciless place. (Brown’s gallery, for example, no longer exists.) The reputation that Berlin has many artists but few collectors did not deter them. It hasn’t been true for a long time either. And so here is the following recommendation. The collector Manuela Alexeyev, with the help of the journalist Thomas Kausch, has written a book called “It’s not about the money”. It has just been published by Steidl and tells the story of a Pan Am stewardess and a meat goods logistics specialist who, through sheer passion, willingness to learn and with a knack for timing and swapping, have put together an enchanting collection of the Felixmüller drawing for 175 DM to contemporary art, which has matured in her living room over the years to be worth millions: a bit like the story of Hans im Glück, only backwards until there is a large pile of gold in the room (in this case gold-plated charcoal briquettes by Alicja Kwade.) Anyone planning to Collecting art yourself can learn something here. Anyone who wants to know why Udo Lindenberg once chased Nena’s poodle through the garden colored green, too. Because it is also an extremely entertaining history book from the Currywurst+Champagne West Berlin.