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.