Exhibitions – Page 9 – Crystal Ball Berlin

Elke Graalfs – Over The Hill

Painting/ Installation/ Performan
ce14.05.2011 to 17.06.2011
Opening at Fr. 13 May 2011 at 8 p.m.
with performance by the artist: Rote Beete, weißes Beten
until 17.6. with finissage and performance: No!

There is space above the hill. This space is imagination, a floating condition. The art works of Elke Graalfs move in inner, as much as in physical spheres. Tracks and tasks always link biographical experiences that can be recorded automatically in pictures and also in books to explore the hidden. Colour, constitutional material, is understood like fibre and track of stereoscopic construction that heighten the aspect of an absent reality. The coats, the pullovers, the knitted human gown, are images of a protective weaved cover, which hide here an invisible body. Painting expands over the borders of frame and casts into the three dimensional. The land and subject of dream. Like something whose weight is hypothetically heavy realised in suspension, shows up the visionary. Body’s physicalness, universal of our life description, gets the material for emanation of our needs and longings. Fortune is according to Schopenhauer the absence of pain, but here its admiration to the current existence of our self. The artist defines this in an alchemistic manner, the combination of polar ingredient in favour to the investigation and creation of impossibility.

At the opening of the exhibition, Elke Graalfs presents the performance “Red Beds – White Prayer”

Kirsty Kross – Gang Bang Yin Yang / Benjamin Blanke – The Fire Of My Love

Exhibition opening with performance,
Fr. 8. April at 8 p.m. – 15 p.m.
15. April 2011, open daily from 3 pm to 8 pm

Kirsty Kross Legs Akimbo Benjamin Blanke Gallery Crystal Ball Berlin

The miniature portrait series of Benjamin Blanke possess a special characteristic- a mannerist and ironic form of representation in portraiture. In most of the works, only the head of the subject is featured. Closely below the chin, on the neck, the composition abruptly ends, but still fills the pictorial space to the edge. The underlying theme of the works – physicalness, achieves in the reduced use of basic material, its subject.

Benjamin Blanke: Yul Brunner Gallery Crystal Ball — Yul Brunner, Benjamin Blake

The performances of Kirsty Kross alias Legs Akimbo, member of the popular band Team Plastique, involve creating situations where the audience experiments with social interaction and play within an improvised and flexible group context.

In GANG BANG YIN YANG the artist will also work with the ever-changing music ensemble, The Love Hospital Experimental Orchestra, to create an anti-perfectionist Happening between two polar extremes. The exhibiton features drawings of the artist as well as the results of the action.

Gang Bang, Kirsty Kross, Performance

Kirsty Kross Legs Akimbo Galerie Crystal Ball Berlin — Legs Akimbo, Kirsty Kross, Performance

Frank Schoppmeier – Kapital und Dosenfleisch

Installation/ Objects
Opening on Fri. 4. March 2011 at 8 p.m., with a concert by Senor Depressiv

Art Frank Schoppmeier Courtesy Gallery Crystal Ball Berlin — Art, Frank Schoppmeier

Frank Schoppmeier’s objects and installations create new levels of meaning and possible image theories by combining various iconographic references. The layers and pictorial means used point to our visual memory in their historical pop-cultural relationship. A fleeting image reception, with its learned and categorizing effects, acts like a blind spot in our constituted order. The artist works with the shifts of these boundaries, on the perception and analysis of an irritating pop art.

Frank Schoppmeier Capital and Canned Meat Gallery Crystal Ball Berlin — Capital and canned meat, Frank Schoppmeier

Wolfgang Müller – Lokomotion – Valeska Gert

Exhibition opening on Fri. 7. January 2011 at 8 pm

Fri. 11. February, Finissage at 8 p.m.: with the presentation of rare recordings of Valeska Gert: Valeska Gert reads from her book/Valeska is reading from her book: “Ich bin a Hexe” (9: 35 min.) and an interview with Valeska Gert from 1964 (27: 15 min.)

Wolfgang Müller Lokomotion - Valeska Gert Gallery Crystal Ball Berlin — Invitation card to Wolfgang Müller Lokomotion – Valeska Gert , 2010

Starting January 2011 Crystal Ball presents Wolfgang Müller´s „Lokomotion-Valeska Gert“, an installation of his same titled silk screens. The gallery space will become a break room. A place of persistence and hesitation is developing. With these silk screens the radical performance Pause by Valeska Gert (1892 – 1978) will be put forth. It is based on the only existing picture document, a 1928 printed photo.

At the same time to this, the exhibition “Pause. Valeska Gert: Bewegte Fragmente” at the Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum für Gegenwart, will run until the 6th of February. The show is currently curated by An Paenhuysen and Wolfgang Müller.

Concerning Valeska Gert´s Pause: In the cinema of the 2oth century due to the change of the film acts there were breaks. The managers of cinemas charged artists and musicians to fill in these gaps and bridge these technical discontinuities with short appearances.

Valeska Gerts dancing performance basically and radically experiments in her special realistic aesthetic with the trivial limits of technology. She materializes and doubles phenomena of discontinuity with her body, working with it as a substance. Therewith she opens a fundamental intermediate position to the mainstream during that time period it brought out in the euphoria of the futurists or the cultural pessimism of the conservative revolution.

The artist danced the Pause, using short and single movements that lead to a gesture with crossed arms overhead – and remained frozen “until everyone in the audience felt what a pause implies.” This Non Movement lasted till the end of the film break. “For all arts that are movement, like Happening and Performance, Pause of Valeska Gert is fundamental and similar to the composition 4´33 of

John Cage for the music” writes Wolfgang Müller. (Wolfgang Müller: Ästhetik der Präsenzen. Valeska Gert, Martin Schmitz Verlag, Berlin 2010.)

The installation „Lokomotion“ shows three silk screens which Wolfgang Müller created together with his assistant Hrafnkell Brynjarson from the only reproduced photo of Gert´s performance. The way of a technically established pause with the use of materials and body, displays Gert´s motion of repose. It also focuses a basic question of mankind: An ancient minimal definition of life is the possibility of animation from place to place (Loco-motion). What if the place itself moves? – Human being as a self animated movement? “Pause”, turns into a fundamental political issue and is emblazoned in red letters like the word “strike”!

The gallery invites everyone to meditation, contemplation, providing one leisure in-between calculated economical profit and our right on laziness.

Wolfgang Müller: Lokomotion - Valeska Gert — Lokomotion – Valeska Gert, Wolfgang Müller, screen printing

jesusboutique – Restposten aus Berlin

Opening on Friday, 19. November 2010 at 7 p.m.
only until Sunday, 21. November 2010, 10 pm

jesusboutique: Remaining posts from Berlin, autumn/winter 2010 — Remaining items from Berlin, autumn/winter 2011

The artists of jesusboutique collected for more than one and a half year clothes which they found on the streets of Berlin. They cleaned and stored these safely. Now jesusboutique present their collection in a three day exhibition as a stock lot shop that ironically fits into the neighbourhood with its shops “Mode aus Paris” and “Restposten aus London”. Sometimes the found items are even coming from this extremely price reduced shops. Forced by the modern clothing industry, social and ecological exploitation produces as a side effect a current obsolescence that represents itself explicitly in its exercised throw-away mentality. In “Restposten aus Berlin” the significance and its depreciation get together in relation on each other in a changing room.jesusboutique presenting a gratis collection: The spring/summer, autumn/winter 2011!

jesusboutique Restposten from Berlin Galerie Crystal Ball Berlin

Tuddl – New Works,Berlin

Painting, object in the cat salon
Opening on Sat. 27. November 2010 at 8 pm

tuddl new working berlin gallery crystal ball berlin cat art — New Works, Tuddl, Katzenkunst, Bremen 2004

Since the 80ties, in painting, the discovery of artistic work of cats is consistently centre of attraction in the discourse of abstract expressive art. For the first time in Berlin, Tuddl exhibits objects and new works on canvas.The expressive and intense works own a fascinating sensitivity in their spontaneous gesture. The choice of colours and the texture are inimitable in its interaction and satisfy by its intuitive facility. In modern art Tuddls´ Paw Slash Coverings of artworks from human colleagues take an eminent position. With his pads he transformed works and postcards from Walt Disney, Manfred Kirschner, Monika Müller Kroll, Wolfgang Müller, Gerhard Richter, Jelena Simic and others. In request of the artist within the exhibition there will be a cat lounge, as a comparative installation with more pictures from human artists.

jesusboutique – All You Need Is Lost

27. August – 10. October 2010
Sa. 2. October: Long Night of Performance

The actions of the jesusboutique artists focus in their work political and social absurdity. In this relation they unmask the subjective as a reflection of an illusion and distortion of own sense. One could say in their installations and performances jesusboutique act as the narrative element in an apparently demystified outside world. So they offered the Temporäre Kunsthalle including the actual exhibition (curated by John Bock) and associated café and bookshop on the web site “immobilienscout24”. The hall that is to be finally closed and deconstructed on the 31st of august should be, according to the artist duo leaded to a wise aim. Through the fact of its actual installation the building features 3 attached floors with enough space to live. In case that it is to break away categorically, jesusboutique propose that the “Palast der Republik” should be reconstructed to stand as a steady spot for a Kunsthalle in Berlin. It is to fight against waste and hedonism. Political, Social and cultural disparities are to be dissolved. Art is to be dying says jesusboutique, while Jonathan Meese is proclaiming the revolution of it, they claim to release it from its sickness. From the 27th of august the actors of jesusboutique show “All You Need Is Lost” and fill the space with paintings, clothes and what they like to do, of Crystal Ball gallery in Kreuzberg. In winter the first record of jesusboutique will be released.

Living on the castle square! jesusboutique gallery crystal ball berlin — Jesus boutique

Ali Mongo – Et in Arcadia ego

Exhibition opening on Fri. 4 June at 8 p.m.
Sat. 31. 7. 2010 San Francisco Night/ Finissage at 8 p.m.
Performances by Laura Bean and Justin F. Kennedy

Crystal Ball Gallery presents the works of Mongolian-born artist Ali Mongo (º1938) who lives at the moment in San Francisco. The title of the exhibition “Et in Arcadia ego” (Even in Arcadia I exist) refers to the ironic combination of a quotidian conviviality with the shadow of death in Ali Mongo’s work. The artist’s imagery fuses inspiration drawn from his Mongolian roots with creative impulses from his travels as a seaman around the globe. In his colourful paintings the artist creates a garden populated by animals, creatures and humans, connected through his impressions and thoughts. A special iconography of abstract forms mixed with figurative gestures is constructed through pushed pointillism and waves of the paint brush. Ali Mongo, whose name always changes on the go, is influenced by modern art as well as by the daily human interrelationships that catch his eye in North Beach, a neighbourhood in which the Beat-spirit somehow never really died. In North Beach Ali Mongo is a well-known character. Photographed by many, he has also had poetry dedicated to him, such as Dave Steel’s Cognac Apprenticeship with Sammy Ali Baba. Outside Ali Mongo’s window, where Grant corners onto Fresno Alley, the blues pulsate out of the Saloon and provide him with the necessary musical vibe. Around the corner is Café Trieste where Ali Mongo paints every day. In the 1950s and 1960s Café Trieste was a legendary meeting place for Beat movement writers, sex-related performers and activists. Nowadays it still continues to attract artists and writers. His nights Ali Mongo spends in the sailors bar Specs at the other side of City Lights bookstore. The small size of his paintings is not only the result of living permanently in cramped hotel rooms. In contrast to the present-day art scene the humility of his work has an inimitable magnitude about it. Mongo will be present during the exhibition by way of a video message.

Curated by Manfred Kirschner and An Paenhuysen.

Andreas Kotulla – Weihnachten in Tirol mit der Feichter-Familie und weiteren Veranstaltungen

Opening on Fri. 26th. March at 8 p.m.
27.03. until 23.04.2010 with Finissage at 8 p.m.

Christmas in Tyrol with the Feichter family, Andreas Kotula

Andreas Kotulla works in the areas of painting and drawing that are approximate to each other. He uses color more as an object-like means. Their pasty, gestural and often reduced drawing mission also always implies the constitution and visual blurring on the image to be reproduced. The artist very often uses prints reproductions of photographs, which he translates constructively into his medium.

His artistic gesture is adapted to the view and makes the imagery appear in a way of vision. Kotulla’s works are often uncommentless, unpretentious and humorous, in a subjective selection that removes the individual motif as fragmentary from the world.

For the window pane and the space of the gallery, Andreas Kotulla will bring together a series of black-and-white drawings of group photos and “events” in an installation that shows us subjective, humorous and mysterious assumptions of the artist. In Kotulla’s translation, the processes and results of human society seem irritating, downright exemplary and full of blank spaces. The egocentric, physical separation of the individuals appears inbridgeable, even in the embrace, in the picture.

In A Shadow Box (projected drawings)

Opening on Friday 12. February 2010 at 8 pm
February 12 – 20. March 2010

In his 1899 text “Screen Memory,” Sigmund Freud considers how memories are permeable and can be recalled in an altered state. The screen memory refers to the temporal separation between the consciousness and the object of memory. In 1925, Freud revisits this concept in “A Note on the ‘Mystic Writing Pad,’” in which he suggests a common children’s toy might be a metaphor for the way that memories accumulate in the mind. With the lifting of the transparent top page, figures are erased, and new drawings can be made; however, the pressure of the writer’s hand leaves behind traces, recorded on a medium just beneath this diaphanous surface. With reference to these ideas, the exhibition “In a Shadow Box” will transform the gallery space into a dark room for exploring the ontology of drawing. Like a shifting archive of images, unique drawings will appear and dematerialize into shadow and light through the media of transparency and glass. The viewer is invited to take part in an associative thinking process about the latent strategies of remembrance. Images will fluctuate upon the wall as if those imaginings of the mind, which Schopenhauer once described as a kind of cognitive projection, can be rendered ever more fleeting and ephemeral.