EXHIBITIONS IN EUROPE; ONGOING AND SOME TO LOOK FORWARD TO

The Guggenheim museum in Berlin shows Agathe Snows' All access world until the 30th of March.

Miró at Tate Modern in London. Tate will show some of the key works from the colourful surrealist painter from Catalonia. Exhibition starts the 14th of April.

The Venice Biennale 2011. The 54th biennale will open in June.

BERLIN, ICH LIEBE

Between 28^th of February and the 2^nd of March I went to Berlin and one of my days there was spent visiting the Bauhaus museum, located on Klingelhöferstrasse 14 D.

I had planned on visiting the museum and somehow I happened to come across it while exploring Charlottenburg, a huge part of the Berlin city centre. The sun was out, it was a crisp morning with bright sunlight shining upon the rainbow coloured pillars and the white minimalistic building. The museum lies just beside the river and huge willow trees grow around it. A sign in primary colours lead the way towards the forward thinking designers who begun with Walter Gropius.

Inside, you get to see the many expressions of the Bauhaus group, the textile, the architecture, the furniture, and the ceramics. It is quite a small museum, but there is still a rich exhibition to experience. I wanted every chair I saw. The design is so anonymous, and yet so special. The industrial steel frames, the hand woven fabric, the cool greys and the striking oranges. Because it is so simple and so ingenious you can picture the designs in your own home, you want it in your own home, and that makes it good design.

Some of the lead words of Bauhaus, like original, innovative, form and function, really comes through in their work. Mies van der Rohe and Vassily Kandinsky were ever-present in the rest of my Berlin tour. The exquisite national gallery with art from 1900 to 1945 is a giant, the scale of the building makes one feel infinitely small. The Kulturforum offers several museums, apart from those in the centre around Friedrichstrasse.

The general impression of Berlin is vastness, to walk the huge streets and stare in wonder at the towering buildings. New and old together, there always seems to be construction somewhere, to expand the already giant city.

I also visited Tascheles, which is an artist collective, on Oranienburgerstrasse 54-56a in a building that is close to crumbling. All around the older quarters have been destroyed, leaving a hollow for Tascheles to claim, with their barracks and tents and amazing metal sculptures. Inside, you climb the graffiti covered stairs to find some closed doors, but occasionally one is open, and you’re invited in to an artist studio. There’s much to discover, and the artists are keen to talk about their work.

HEADS UP.

A butoh dance show premiered last night and will run to this Sunday 6th March.
FRAUKE / VOID @ Atalante, Gothenburg Sweden. 

ANNA LING / OCEANS OF AIR.

Oceaner av luft (Oceans of Air) by Anna Ling is currently on display between
25th Feb - 20th March in Gallery 54, Gothenburg Sweden.

I went to see the exhibitions during it's opening night. I went solo to openings that night, and I think I quite like it that way. You obviously meet people either from before or make new acquaintances. But it also makes you and let you actually look at the art because you have to engage in something if not chatting up some old or new faces. My tip to you, it's like the cinema, it can be quite liberating to go by yourself if you are comfortable with it. Openings are more an event of the sort to meet people you haven't seen for a long time or new people you come across along the way in queue for a glass of free wine. In other words, not so much art really. I sometimes like to go to openings as a social event but sometimes I want it to be quiet and just go to exhibitions during it's display in non rush hours so to speak. I always go twice if I go on openings, to get a second impression by the art itself rather than the event.

Oceans of Air, the title which I've translated literally from Swedish. I was captivated immediately by the title which has a poetic ring to it. The ocean is a metafor for the sky this time, ocean in plural Oceans of Air. Referring to when you look out the window up in an airplane and what you can see at times are actually Oceans of Air. This is what you see in Ling's drawings. A scheme with lines that accentuates excerpts of this big ocean. She's not making outlines of fluffy clouds obviously but instead reduced vertical lines that just gets you a hint of the shape the air is forming in the sky. Brilliantly executed, eleven drawings in pencil and ink are on display. They are very quiet and minimalistic to their aesthetics with white frames on white walls. The clouds varies in shades of grey, with a hint of beige in it if I'm not mistaken.

The first two words I scribbled down when I walked away from the venue was silence and isolating. In a venue full of people, chatting drinking and drinking wine, this is what the drawings gave me silence and isolation. It felt just like when you are either up in the air or in a tunnel on a train suddenly your ears are locked and you can't hear properly, that's how I experienced the drawings, but without the uncomfortable lock that sometimes hurts of course. They were open, quiet and changing. Transience as clouds are, Ling captures that quite accurately. They are suggested to be a metafor for the transiency in everyday life, forever changing and hard to get a hold of. And what Anna Ling does is just that, trying to get a hold of something that's impossible to grasp.

Image taken from Gallery 54.