Umbigo, May 2022

This year’s Gallery Weekend Berlin featured a new mix of emerging and established artists, bringing together around 50 galleries. Between openings and reviews, the best compliment is that the event continues to promote a platform for dialogue and diversity.

Once again, Gallery Weekend managed to create a kind of rehearsed coincidence, a series of common affinities and concerns, but also a heterogeneous landscape with places that open only during the week.

At Klemm’s, for example, the Adrian Sauer’s solo show focused on metapointillism. The topic was brought up in relation to the several photographs presented  at the show, worked pixel by pixel to exhaustion through digital drawing, as well as a panel composed of the 256 possible shades between black and white.

The discussion was not unheard of for Grey Crawford, re-evoked in a solo exhibition at Persons Project, just a few hundred meters to the west. There, the emphasis was put on the way in which space is removed from the initial referent in the manipulation of the photograph through composition and over-composition, in a denaturalisation process.

We can also speak of the affinities between Colleen Harden, Filip Kostic, Yein Lee, Andrew Rutherdale and Jonas Schoeneberg. At the Scherben Gallery, they explored the synthetic as opposed to the organic realm through various dysfunctional and redundant automatic devices.

And also, of the affinities this might have with at dawn, a group exhibition at the Julia Stoschek Collection, which also opened within this context. A proposal for counter-poetry was outlined, an aggregating place for multiple spiritual, psychological and physical enclaves, using the utopian horizon of art to establish a connection between the notions of celebration, strength, singularity and knowing.

Originally written in Portuguese. Translated and published by Umbigo