Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Aaron is one of the artists that we worked with for our book By Hand. He has an exhibition that’s ongoing at Zach Feuer Gallery in New York. His carvings on basswood are impressive both for the Expressionist-like compositions and sense of physical weight with which they confront you. Plus their all black presentation lends [...]
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
FM3’s Tuesday night performance at 2 Kolegas was certainly a treat. The defining element of FM3’s sound is the drone collage - a technique they developed through their much lauded Buddha Box performances. The highlight of the show was the final number in which the drone of loops and guitar built to a glorious crescendo [...]
Wow - Zhang Huan seems to be everywhere this week. He’s got a show at Haunch of Venison in Berlin, a retrospective at the Asia Society in New York, was mentioned in no less than four emails I’ve received in the past few days.
Images below from Haunch of Venison:
Despite the misleading moniker (not an Asian branch of the Hollywood mainstay) Universal Studios Beijing has drawn quite a bit of praise recently. In an article for Frieze Magazine published last week, Jörg Heiser suggests that the gallery offers the best exhibition program among all of the capital’s 300+ art spaces. And he may be [...]
That’s the title of the survey of recent Japanese art currently on display at three separate galleries in the 798 district: Long March Space, Beijing-Tokyo Art Projectsand the new InterArt Center. There’s a lot to look at - doe-eyed aliens, polka-dotted spheres, toy trains, an inverted hello kitty doll, a 3 meter tall robot and [...]
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
Today’s Hansaviertel sits just north of Berlin’s Tiergarten on a site that was decimated during WW2. The 1957 Interbau competition gave international stars of modern architecture (Aalvar Aalto, Walter Gropius, Arne Jacobsen, Oscar Niemeyer, et al.) an opportunity to develop a “city of tomorrow” pretty much from scratch. The result is a collection of 36 [...]
There is a fine line between the complex flavor of a caramelized and crisped pastry crust and one that has been charred. The chausson aux pommes at Barcellos Salon Sucre in Kreuzberg sits precisely on that edge, allowing heat and chemistry to draw out the sweetness of the apples and complement it with a pastry [...]
Down a small side street off of Lobeckstraße inside a renovated late 19th century factory building swaddled by a 1970s expansion project, Matthias Böttger and Friedrich von Borries have set up shop. Not a retail shop, but a studio from which they develop projects related to urbanization and curious social phenomena (e.g., German cowboys and [...]
Early reports figured on this year’s Art Forum Berlin being the most widely-attended art fair yet staged in Berlin, and judging by the crowd on hand during its third day of operation, they may have been right.
After a few hours surveying, Shu and I noticed several common themes among the crop of artists [...]
Coffee with marzipan-laced cookies. The scent of early autumn decay by the banks of canals. Flea markets with relics worth owning. Bookshops with titles so beautifully packaged that German editions beckon to be purchased, despite my inability to read them. Shops whose casually minimalist styling and wittily conceptual offerings are motivated by intellectual pass times [...]