Cheese Abu
Last episode of my report on Art Forum Berlin. ALready seems so far away…
The art school Kunsthochschule Berlin Weißensee & Freunde was showing the work of its students. Sebastian Neeb’s monkeys got all my attention.
Hip Hop and Told You Not To
While the addition of stripped dogs and comic characters in So Yong Park’s paintings of what would otherwise look like everyday life scenes intrigued me.
Ice-cream 1
The Kunstpunkt Gallery had invited Leonard Schlüter to show us his bum portraits of people working in their front lawn.
Baden-Württemberg I and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern I
Miltos Manetas was already creating video game-inspired paintings back in 1995. And since last year painting and drawing screenshots of video games is becoming very trendy. The Netzwerk Offenbach Gallery had brought 3 of Oliver Raszewski‘s Screens canvas and i surprised myself by finding them quite good. I liked the way the works turned the banal shooting of a video game soldier into a silent, “peaceful” and nearly poetic moment. That’s how i saw it.
Two artists whose work i was happing to discover were Karsten Kusch with his drawings of trucks and cranes and Ivo Lucas who sets beautiful people on a paradisiac island and has them commit sinful deeds.
Anja Fußbach‘s Harakiri bunny and Karussell were a huge hit with kids…
But not so much with me. I often find myself in this situation: a so-so artwork looks good on photo and i can’t help posting them while a piece that blows me away is badly lit, my camera is crap and it all remains in my head.
Karussel is a kind of Magic Round About on viagra. Parents would make the carrousel spin while children were crawling and sitting on mannequin which looked like they had been rescued from a trash bit and dressed with SM accessories and knitted caps.
These two days at the art fair were fantastic. No shadow of new media art in sight and i wish i could say that i can get used to it. On the one hand, i love finding myself among art works which are totally tech free mainly because i sometimes need a break from new media art exhibitions, it allows me to get back to them with fresh eyes, new perspective and more elaborated criteria. On the other hand, i feel uncomfortable when i realize year after year that digital art is ignored by the contemporary art world. There are examples that contradict that observation here and there but man, i could do with more contradictions.