Galerie Crystal Ball

James Beatham – Radiant Springs

Installation/ Drawing

Vernissage, Saturday, September 7th. , 7pm

fridays from 3 to 7 pm, & after appointment, exhibition runs until Oktober, 18th.

Artist Talk on sunday, oktober, 6th at 4pm

James Beatham, Initial Sketch for an Ceramic Fountain, Berlin 2024

James Beatham’s artistic oeuvre encompasses drawing, ceramics, painting and objects. In multi-part installations, the artist combines all these expressions in one form and brings them into communication in diverse, imaginative arrangements. He creates model-like habitats or sets which, as miniaturized urban landscapes, reveal relations that are both meaningful and mysterious. They are constructed from mysterious objects, images, personal relics, poetic allusions and have a strong narrative quality. They in turn contain art, the impossible, the fictitious, perhaps literarily imagined, the future, which echoes in the interior as if in a reflection. Beatham’s means seem free and develop through their combination. Even the scales of the objects used are not uniform, so that the resulting worlds, surreally detached from everything, like space stations, simultaneously cite mythical and real places far removed from their known location. Some things seem to stand out of context like an incongruous souvenir, absurd but equally integrated, so that associations arise quite casually. Many of these small worlds have a fountain or even a fountain in common as the central object around which everything is arranged. The fountains are of different shapes and designs and can be seen as an image of the basic conditions of human settlements, dwellings and habitats. The artist also provides lighting and light. The rippling of the water, a natural sound, also acts as a logical argument. James Beatham thus creates places that seem alive. The presence of these works appears inviting. The artist dares to create a special simultaneity here. He allows the users of the water, the people and animals, to be absent. Through this void, he draws the viewer into his spaces and allows us to experience the landscape in our contemplation. In a similar way to model landscapes, we consider how we would live in it if it were adapted to our scale. At the same time, he throws us out through profanity and the use of the absurd – he places a manquette in our view and thus shows us the design-like, the unreal, the artificial, as the outside of things. In this challenge between inside and outside, these special compositions by the artist develop a dialectical sound that, animated by this extraordinary effect, can tell stories of creatures and people quite freely.
To accompany the installations, James Beatham is showing a series of new drawings and ceramic objects.

James Beatham drawing
James Beatham, option one, Drawing

Manfred Kirschner – Smoke Three Flames

exhibtion while summerbreak

Vernissage June, 23th, 8 pm, open after appointment: Tel: 0151 55910099

Manfred Kirschner, Smoke Three Flames, 140 x 120 cm, Acryl/ Papier auf Leinwand, 2024

Store & Crystal Ball Boutique for Sellerie Weekend

For the first time, Crystal Ball is presenting the boutique behind the exhibition space especially for Sellerie Weekend and is showing special prints, editions and art by Marion Bösen, Katharina Willand, Mimi-Mo, Lydia Karstadt, Gabriele Regiert and many other artists of the gallery.

The exhibition Store by M. Bösen and S.K. Willand and the boutique are open on Friday and Saturday from 2 to 7 pm.

We look forward to your visit!

Marion Bösen & Susanne Katharina Willand

Store

cover and shine through
Exhibition Opening on friday, 12.04.2024 at 7 pm

special opening times for Sellerie Weekend: Fr., 26.4 & Sa., 27.4., 15 bis 19 Uhr

Come and see the Crystal Ball Boutique for Sellerie Weekend

12.04.2024 – 10.05.2024

What is this about – is this a store, can you buy something here? Can you get information here? What’s actually going on with the window? The openings in the wall for light and fresh air, covered with curtains and blinds and curtains and curtains so that no one can see how we behave inside. Or sometimes we do. Then there’s a design intention or an aesthetic purpose or outdoor advertising. Or I stand behind the curtain and observe without being seen. The curtain is the membrane between my cell and the outside world, between the private and the public, the obvious and the hidden.

The artists Marion Bösen and Susanne Katharina Willand work with photography and with the strategies of their translations into other media. Marion Bösen often devotes her extensive printmaking oeuvre to phenomenological large sets and photographic series, which she transforms into series of screen prints or installative large surfaces. The artist collects images of objects in dysfunctional contexts, extraordinary situations in everyday urban life and everyday life and phenomena that may remain unexplained for the time being. The result is all kinds of collections, abandoned televisions, mattresses, dead birds and
rabbits, fruit and vegetables, spurned sandwiches. Or even the however failed or well-intentioned repair of stonework in the pavement of a pavement of a square in Sao Paulo. The rhythmic patterns and wallpaper patterns and wallpapers of vegetable crates, wigs, slices of bread or chicken eggs
– our entire multi-part world is revealed in Marion Boesen’s attentive attentive gaze. The isolated, simple object, the lifeless, lost animal body, but also the large sets that paint our everyday lives like modern still lifes, appear charged with an almost living presence.

Susanne Katharina Willand works in a similar field, she is interested in cloths, things,
stones, fields, mountains – landscape. In the artist’s current working method, the objects and scenes are translated into embroidery. She pays particular attention to the pattern, structure and spatiality of the shape. Thus the lines of the design of a commercially available drying towel, for example, are in its
state when the cloth is randomly thrown in its folds are Willands theme. In these distortions of the pattern, the artist uses the embroidery needle to evoke the actually absent three-dimensionality with the embroidery needle. She folds and arranges a tablecloth in such a way that a mountain landscape becomes tangible or she embroiders fine shadows into a cloth spread out flat in front of us so that it looks as if it has just been been crumpled up and was lying there unironed. The interest
in the oscillation of the difference between spatiality and surface is unmistakable, as is the
phenomenological collection, which she shares with Marion Bösen. In their joint exhibition at the Crystal Ball, the artists are showing an installation specially designed for the gallery, in which they work with
the shop window of the space.

Christine Schulz – Gedankenturm III

Opening Reception Sat. January 6th, 2024

Until february 9th., irregurlarly & by appointment
visible daily, from 7- 10 pm from outside

Christine Schulz – Gedankenturm III, Worpswede, 2022

The artist Christine Schulz has already created two installations under the title “Gedankenturm” (Tower of Thoughts), which very effectively combine images, objects and projections into a whole using the techniques of collage and consciously evoke associations. In Christine Schulz’s installations, the respective location always occupies an important position; the architecture is part of the work and gives space to the images and, above all, the light images. Light and illumination, the illuminated and object-like image in connection with its reflection, physically or in terms of content, are important design features of the artist’s work.

Movement is now added in Gedankenturm II and III. Despite the solid, profound materials used, Christine Schulz is not interested in conveying a single fixed message. On the contrary, through the fleeting and chronologically varying style of her buildings, she keeps the eye on connections and contexts of meaning that take us along as viewers in an open form. The poetic title: Tower of Thought already gives a hint. Can we pile up thoughts? Perhaps this is how it should be understood; the thoughts and ideas that we build on top of each other result in a construct of argumentation and chains of evidence, realities. A kind of ideal building that results from our perceptions. But is this not the danger of failure? Isn’t this precisely why we are threatened with the collapse of our constructions that we thought were safe? The artist Christine Schulz playfully makes this invisible structure visible to us in her installations by simultaneously relativizing it. She combines and assembles universals, objects, images and apparent trifles to create a living space. Originals and representatives of our world interact with each other through light, position, reflection and mirroring. She sets an airplane in motion, brings our sun, the star that sustains us, into the exhibition space and relates it to the projection of empty Coke bottles, a tinsel curtain in front of steel pipes and other objects. On the one hand, it is possible to enter this narrative landscape and its changing perspectives, to wander through it mentally. On the other hand, we can see the construction plan shining through in this suspension of opposites, i.e. the oscillation of our perception between poetics and a neutral view. In this way, we see both the world presented to us and the thoughts that create it. In the construction of reality, we discover a cycle, a complex network of relationships that can be both poetically and intellectually illuminating.

Piece Shop

8.12. – 31.12. 2023 open by appointment

Der Piece Shop und das saisonale, wechselnde Schaufenster dazu.

At first glance, the shop window of the Piece Shop looks like a romantic winter cliché. However, the artificial snow is made from shredded bank statements from the gallery and the works and offers on display subtly indicate that something is not quite right here or what it seems. An exhibition that only works at second glance. Lydia Karstadt and Gabriele Regiert have created two new screen print editions for the changing installation.

In the Piece Shop we are showing works by: Henrik Jacob, Miriam Jadischke, Vikenti Komitski, Andreas Kotulla, Sigrun Paulsen, Gabriele Regiert, Silky, Caren Sielaff and other artists.

It all began with the first “Prêt á Manger” edition, which Gabriele Regiert designed especially for the Crystal Ball in 2017. Still an absolute bestseller today. In the meantime, the crispbread
has to be ordered abroad. Around 80 small beads are then also worked into the low points of the bread slice. Signed on the back with the artist’s nail polish, they are framed in the exhibition space. The last examples of the serial unique pieces now cost 140 plus shipping.
Now, however, Lydia Karstadt & Gabriele Regiert have started a brand new series: There will be the official Prêt á Manger T Shirt ! (Price: 90,- €) After some refinements in the production technique, because we are now really approaching the Prê á porter with the sewing on of the beads, we are going into production from today. 🙂 Pre-orders possible! The edition is for the benefit of the exhibition space and the artist.

In addition to the new Pret â Mànger Edition, Lydia Karstadt offers the exceptional I- Shirt. Alongside the I Phone and I Pad, this is an indispensable, electronic-free accessory. The portrait of one of her eyes is transferred to her T-shirt.
The store is open on Fri. Dec. 8 and Sat. Dec. 9 from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. and afterwards by appointment.

Zugvögel Ensemble invites you to: ˈpælɪmpsest

Performance – free improvisation
Friday, 11/24/2023
ˈpælɪmpsest I: 7 p.m.
ˈpælɪmpsest II: 8 p.m

With ˈpælɪmpsest, the Zugvögel ensemble creates another world from the vibrations of their gut- and swarm intelligence after “Analogschatten” and “Träumen mit Bäumen”. Be a witness, be welcome.

On November 24, the Zugvoegel-Ensemble will land in the Crystal Ball with their new discursive performance “ˈpælɪmpsest”. They will be accompanied by discarded furs, whose immanent inscriptions will inevitably bring their own readings to the game.

On Friday 11/24/2023 there will be two free improvisations that will develop out of the moment.
Afterwards, the players will be happy to talk to the audience. Admission is half an hour before the start at 6.30 p.m.

Zentrale Verwaltung – Nobert Bauer & Ralf Tekaat

Opening Reception: Sat. 23rd of September, 7pm

Zentrale Verwaltung – performative Reading, Friday, 13. Okt., 9pm

until Sat. 11. November 2023

Zentrale Verwaltung – Norbert Bauer / Ralf Tekaat, Ausstellungsdetails, Herbstausstellung Kunstverein Hannover 2022

Administrations create an idealized, formalized version of other areas of social life.
social life. They express the processes there in numbers, ratios, procedures, or regulations, and at the same time have an effect on them. Administration and reality generate each other, but are not congruent.
The work Zentrale Verwaltung by the artists Norbert Bauer and Ralf Tekaat deals with institutions and forms of expression of an “administered world”: Authorities, forms, documents, service instructions, organization charts, administrative buildings, etc. are as familiar as they are incomprehensible as constitutive elements of social life. The artists attempt to express this ambivalent relationship in their collaboration with the means of drawing. The aim of the series is not to create clarity, but to get lost in corridors, service rooms, outbuildings, regulations, optimization strategies and responsibilities.
So far, the Central Administration series consists of 270 drawings in A4 format. Zentrale Verwaltung continues to grow and has so far been shown in exhibitions in Hamburg at the Nachtspeicher, in Bremen at the Güterbahnhof in the art associations of Speyer, Hannover and Fischerhude. This summer she has now been awarded the Heitland Foundation Prize. The multi-part work reflects and evokes, in addition to its free representational force virtuously, the sensitivities associated with bureaucratic and administrative processes. Emotions lurk in the rows of leaves; indeed, the central administration, with its conceptual, cooperative strategy, quite aptly bundles social as well as personal situations of the viewer. With just one, or even several Di A 4 drawings, the whole drama of a stressful tax settlement, the despair in the face of a nerve-racking ink-guzzling printer, or other existentially stressful stories can be told. But at the same time, because it is bold and free-associated, Central Administration relieves us and we can smile again and distinguish, because really existential, administration is not.

/Performance Summer/ Veronika Dobers: Gesang des Großen Enttäuschten and The Story of Blue, Red and Yellow – Sigrun Paulsen & Manfred Kirschner

Vernissage with performance on Friday, September, 1st, 7 p.m.

Exhibition to Sun. 15th Sept. 2023
Tue. & Fri.: 2 p.m. - 7 p.m., Fri.
and by appointment
Veronika Dobers: Der Gesang des Großen Enttäuschten

With her performance “Song of the Great Disappointed” Veronika Dobers satirically addresses the position of man as the supposedly highest evolved living being. The creator of the world, however, doubts his work, which should culminate in the creation of man. (V.D.)

The artist friends Sigrun Paulsen and Manfred Kirschner, alias Lydia Karstadt, set their quite opposing artistic positions in an exhibition performatively against and with each other and examine the effects as in a collision. It is interesting that especially with this strategy similarities and relationships in common areas become visible, which otherwise would have remained invisible and perhaps would not have emerged. Sigrun Paulsen’s work is dedicated to pure color and its effects, she is concerned with a clarity and musicality also in the reception. In medium and large format works on canvas, Paulsen skillfully explores the combinatorial effects of her self-mixed colors and counter colors, cold and warm hues, which she brings together in deliberate processes. These color combinations thereby bring her paintings into vibration, the colors seem to vibrate. Paulsen’s paintings are free, free of inscribed meaning, nothing is hidden or suggested. They have something pure and are like food for the senses, which one can accept or refuse.

Manfred Kirschner explores in his smaller collages on canvas, irritating strategies of seemingly harmonious subject combinations. He places his protagonists, mostly mannequins, which certainly represent us humans, in melancholic landscapes or historical photographs, as in or historical photographs, as if in film sets and stage sets. The collage knows per se the combination of opposites as a stylistic principle. Kirschner’s art, however, works beyond this with the harmonization of the parts of the picture, such as the adherence to color spatiality or a combination of colors. Very often in Kirschner’s work, as for example in the in Kirschner’s series “The Story Of Blue, Red And Yellow”, for example, the figures are figures stand out from their background in a certain colorfulness, as if they were as if they were displaying themselves in their new pictorial world and also sayingsaying, “Look! I’ve been pasted in here!” Thus, just combinations raise unusual questions, or ironically expand the traditional or ironically expand the traditional lines of vision. Kirschner’spictures seem to draw their lightness from the fact that they are
their own statements at their fractures and distortions, asserting themselves as if they were assert themselves, as if they were above these receptionist processes.
Very often in Kirschner’s work, as for example in the titular series “The Story Of Blue, Red And Yellow,” the figures stand out from their background in a certain colorfulness, as if they were displaying themselves in their new pictorial world and also saying: “Look! I’ve been pasted in here!” Thus, it is these humorous to dramatic combinations that raise unusual questions or ironically expand traditional lines of vision. Kirschner’s paintings seem to draw their lightness from the fact that they make their own statements at their fractures and fault lines, asserting themselves as if they were above these receptionist processes. They free themselves from and the artist from authorship. Thus, if one sees Paulsen’s and Kirschner’s positions side by side, I maintain that both are about an essentiality that is evoked through a harmonization of opposites and polar effects and, beyond that, about a philosophy of freedom with art- Renate Kemper, Berlin 2023




/Performance Sommer/ Unboxing – Evita Emersleben & Manfred Kirschner

Am Sa. 5 August um 19 Uhr

Unboxing, Performance, Evita Emersleben und Manfred Kirschner, Künstlerhaus Bremen, September 2022

Boxing is the sporting variation of the classic fistfight. Boxing is popular worldwide and raises an aggressive, destructive and violent action to the level of a game and competition. To the pacifist-oriented artists Evita Emersleben and Manfred Kirschner, boxing appears as a symbol of a lifestyle based on competition, self-interest and social indifference. They perceive the fight as anti-social and outdated, similar to the impetus of bullfighting. Well, both artists do not want to completely deprive the boxing fight of its justification in their performance “Unboxing”, but rather examine the fight personally with each other in an experimental way, present their critique aesthetically and transcend the fight. Thus, Unboxing also shows, in the form of a social parody, current social tendencies of shifting the trivial into visible ubiquity. The two artistic positions of Emersleben and Kirschner are characterized by a partly open conceptual form, which always plays with the reception of the action by the spectators. Unboxing was first shown in Bremen in 2022 and will be performed again this year at the Crystal Ball on August 5 and at the Villa Sponte in Bremen on August 26

Crystal Ball Berlin