BERLIN—From April 27-30, Berlin celebrated its third annual Art Gallery Weekend. In order to draw attention to the city’s vibrant art scene, leading galleries joined together to create an art extravaganza—each gallery hosting an opening on the same date—that confirms the German capital’s reputation as one of the world’s leading centers of contemporary art.

As might be expected, many galleries pulled out their biggest guns, with the likes of Christopher Wool at Max Hetzler, and Franz Ackermann at Neugerriemschneider. Several galleries, however, took a chance on new faces, such as Hilary Lloyd (Galerie Neu), Haegue Yang (Barbara Wien), and the terrific Danh Vo (Isabella Bortolozzi Galerie).

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Neugerriemschneider
“Franz Ackermann: From Eden to Lima”
Through May 26
Linienstr 155, Berlin 10115

In his fifth solo show with Neugerriemschneider, Franz Ackermann mounts a large-scale installation including painting, drawing, and sculpture. The show features Ackermann’s signature combination of bright abstraction mixed with figurative elements and details of cities drawn from the artist’s extensive travels.

“From Eden to Lima” focuses on a journey of Ackermann’s that followed the path of the conquistadors from Iberia to the coast of Argentina. While the political sensibilities of an exhibition based on a Western artist’s “exotic” travels could easily become simplistic or problematic, Ackermann manages to avoid some of the more obvious pitfalls of his endeavor by focusing on the idea of globalism and by employing, for the most part, the language of abstraction.

At Neugerriemschneider he has created an installation that is bombastic in its scale and palette, but at the same time rendered sensitive through the inclusion of pencil drawings on the walls and several of the artist’s beautiful “mental maps.”

The “maps” are tiny watercolors—often no bigger than a postcard—in which Ackermann records psychological impressions of his travels directly on paper (in contrast to his larger oil paintings and murals, which draw from a collage of found materials collected while traveling, and then later put together in the studio).

The enormous painting and murals featured in “From Eden” tend to locate the viewer within a whirlwind of vibrating shapes and color. Their scale and power appear to echo the onslaught of the globalized world, while in contrast the smaller “maps” draw the viewer in, focusing and holding our attention on a more human scale. While Ackermann keeps the references to his South American sojourn vague, what emerges clearly in this exhibition is the artist’s masterful orchestration of color, line, and form in space.

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Galerie Neu
“Hilary Lloyd: Studio”
Through May 26

For her debut exhibition in Berlin, British artist Hilary Lloyd has focused on her studio as an inspiration for a new double-projection video. Lloyd is best known for dry videos and slide projections that dissect banal gestures and everyday tasks. While related to earlier works in terms of presentation and approach, her “Studio” tackles new terrain, namely, the world of painting.

In 2006 the artist moved into a new studio in the attic of a convent in East London. The studio had previously belonged to an action painter, whom Lloyd did not know, but who had worked his canvases on the ground. Skeins of paint and blocks of color were all that remained from his time in the room.

In her new video, Lloyd has meticulously documented these remnants. With great care, she has charted the territory under her feet and then edited the documentation of a static object—her studio floor—into a moving picture image. Lloyd’s editing has an uneven pace and her camera zooms in and out of the floor irregularly, which serves to destabilize the viewer’s notion of perspective and scale.

The artist toys here with several themes. The videos recall Hans Namuth’s famous photographs of Jackson Pollock working on the floor, while the movements of the camera and her editing reiterate the gesture inherent in the act of painting. Above all, “Studio” meditates on the existence of the artist, and what remains once the artist is gone.

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Galerie Max Hetzler
Christopher Wool
Through May 26

In the press release for Christopher Wool’s stunning new exhibition at Max Hetzler, the artist is quoted as saying, “I became more interested in 'how to paint' than “what to paint.” His new show focuses accordingly on the process of painting.

In a set of monochrome paintings, Wool has sprayed canvases with black spray paint and then used solvent to selectively wipe the lines of paint away. This process was repeated, and the final results are gorgeous gray canvases, in which black lines weave in and out of iridescent gray clouds. While the description sounds dry, the works are pure visual pleasure. Wool’s touch is deft and the graffiti-style sprayed marks seem to shimmer before our eyes.

For a set of new prints, Wool scanned images of the paintings, cut them up, rescanned them, and then printed the result as a silk screen. Like the paintings, the prints are at once firmly anchored in the urban vernacular and intangibly ethereal. References to Pollock and Warhol abound, and like the work of those two artists, Wool’s paintings have the look of classics.

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Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi
"Danh Vo: Good Life”
Through June 9

One of the indisputable highlights of the Berlin Gallery Weekend is Danh Vo’s debut at Isabella Bortolozzi.

While on a recent residency program at the Villa Aurora in Los Angeles, Vo, who is Vietnamese but grew up in Europe, made the acquaintance of a certain Joe Carrier. Carrier is an American who spent time photographing in Vietnam shortly after the war. Unabashedly fetishizing young Asian men, Carrier compiled a unique archive of photographic material that documents life in postwar Vietnam, but with an emphasis on latent homosexual signifiers.

Having formed a friendship in Los Angeles, Carrier allowed Vo to make use of this unique collection of images for his show in Berlin. At Bortolozzi, Vo has made a selection of photographs taken by Carrier and installed them in vitrines sunken into a wall covered with an exotic yellow damask wallpaper. The installation reads as part anthropological museum, part Victorian “chinoiserie.” Vo has renamed Carrier’s images with titles of his own invention, engraved on small bronze plaques. For example, a boy seen from behind carrying a basket of bread is labeled “Boy with Baguettes.”

In “Good Life,” Vo weaves together his own biography as a gay Vietnamese immigrant and that of Carrier, a gay white American of a previous generation. The installation functions as a moving document of two men’s personal histories, as well as a sensitive exploration of their personal (and professional) collaboration. The press release is an integral part of this engrossing, provocative, and sensitive work.

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Barbara Wien
“Haegue Yang: Remote Room”
Through August 31

Haegue Yang’s exhibition “Remote Room” at Barbara Wien is composed of four bodies of work that explore the boundaries between the second and third dimensions and the materiality of the supplies that Yang uses to create her drawings and sculptures.

In a series of large drawings that she calls “Non-Foldings,” Yang has strewn origami objects on large sheets of paper and then spray painted them. The resulting drawing is a constellation of geometric shapes, their outlines revealed as if Yang had used a stencil. Through this process, Yang reduces her origami (pieces of colored paper folded elaborately into small figurines) to its most basic, original element: flat, blank paper.

Conversely, in a set of wall reliefs, DIN A4/DIN A3/ DIN A2 Whatever Being (2006), Yang transforms standard printing paper into three-dimensional sculpture.

Yang’s work is subtle, negotiating between the idea of permanent form and movement in time and space. A new set of drawings references Marcel Broodthaer’s film La pluie (Projet pour un texte), in which a text is erased by the rain as it is being written. Yang’s drawings, like the text, are simultaneously created and erased by raindrops.

Much of Yang’s work deals with the instability of an artist’s life, in constant movement from place to place. At Barbara Wien, two intravenous drip-stands are laden with lightbulbs. Yang calls them “Vulnerable Arrangements,” as they reflect the transience of physical and sensual presence.