Lucky last from the Berlinische Galerie, which I’ve only been to once before shortly after I arrived in Berlin and remembering not liking but felt like I ought to cos it was getting hyped, but here I am a lifetime on and nah still don’t like it. Abstract Expressionism though, I do have a soft spot for my eyes and brain getting fucked on these visuals.
Still at the Berlinische Galerie. Obviously I liked this one. Totalled Deutsch hoonage? Easier fix than changing the timing chain. Sometimes I wonder if I’m emotionally swayed by art which is actually superficial at best and kind of white neoliberal corporate in its heart. I dunno. Would I watch 10 minutes of this Benz doing a Nürburgring lap? Duh! Simple pleasures.
Primarily I went there to see this painting. Me and eyebleed colour, eh. And at the end of a couple of hours, it was still my fave painting. The colours are kinda off in my photo though cos I still have no idea how to do colour-balancing.
First time ever being inside the Neue Nationalgalerie, and with Alison Currie who’s blasting through Berlin / Germland / the north-west Asian peninsula (aka Europe) on a dance / art trip.
One of the last artworks we saw, and the last painting I photographed before we schlepped around the gift shop. It’s supposed to be three chicks perving at a naked dude, but I think it’s three trans women showing off what the fourth could have if she just got on hormones and embraced her femme.
Me, trying to remember what I was looking at in the Neue Nationalgalerie, having forgot every artist’s name, but still, “Oh, yeah, that one, that’s one of my faves,” pointing at Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Potsdamer Platz and Rheinbrücke paintings which I’ve seen heaps of times and still very much faves, or Max Beckmann, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Max Pechstein, Emil Nolde, Wassily Kandinsky … seeing all those artists in context with each other (though minus the ladies, cos … ‘reasons’) and in context geographically and historically is a trip.
Last time I blogged Otto Mueller was when I visited Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig way back in 2016, and when I used to photograph massive amounts of art and edit the fuck out of it all. Which, like everything I get enthusiastic about, became stressy and slightly too intense, whole weeks gone on doing fifty or sixty images per museum, and then a pandemic happened and I’ve been to maybe two or three exhibitions since the start of 2020.
First time ever being inside the very modern architecture, very Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Neue Nationalgalerie, and dragging Alison Currie along, whom I haven’t seen for … fucking years. We were quite loud sozbruh. Me with my still new FujiFilm X-T4 using it for one of the reasons I bought it: photographing aaart. Sascha Wiederhold, very intense, big, detailed paintings.
Yayoi Kusama’s A Bouquet of Love I Saw in the Universe retrospective at Gropius Bau. I think this is called Love Room and is a recreation of the installation from her 1966 Driving Image Show exhibition in Essen. Nice amount of eye-bleed and brain reset here. I like her crazy, feels like next town over from mine.
(ot technical note: I ditched Photoshop a while ago and have been using Affinity Photo, which is much nicer and not Adobe. But my workflow is still kinda hacky, especially with RAW processing and colour balancing. I think this is a better job than Infinity Net A, but equally might be over-saturated and over-processed amateur hour.)
Infinity Net A in Yayoi Kusama’s retrospective at Gropius Bau.Infinity Net A in Yayoi Kusama’s retrospective at Gropius Bau. Very good on my eyes and 10/10 would steal for my private art collection. This was the one that did the brain reset, vibrating physical reaction experience. Only a shadow of that transfers in the photo, but still, I can feel a sharp physiological reaction.
I feel like one of the very few queers in Berlin who’s never been for a night, let alone a weekend at Berghain. Charlene said, “I got a ticket to the exhibition at Berghain, wanna go?” Obviously yah, ’cos when else am I ever going to see inside that luscious body.
The group exhibition was that mix of terrible, uninteresting, kinda interesting, not bad actually, that’s rather good, and, like most group shows, a single one I would want for my hypothetical, ‘I’m mad rich, me’ collection. That kind of good. Monira Al Qadiri’s Holy Quarter, irregular vitreous globes of slippery iridescent black on the floor of the Lab.Oratory dark room.
And Berghain. The concrete and metal waxy soft with generations of physical contact and heavy drug fucking energy. No mirrors, no cameras, and that sound system. I’m not at all one for clubbing these days, but a night there — if I got past the door — I wouldn’t leave that space surrounded by that sound.
Yayoi Kusama’s retrospective at Gropius Bau. One of the paintings reset my brain. This installation I could live in, very peacefully.