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09/04/2009Talking Vernissage: Potsdamer Platz, a cultural renewal misses its mark

Talking Vernissage: Potsdamer Platz, a cultural renewal misses its mark Our local art critic, Jessica Saltz, investigates the once-bustling Berlin cultural nucleus and educates herself in the wonders of Dali.

Potsdamer Platz has grown and shed several skins in the past few years in its aim to regain its former composure.  Once a lively cultural nucleus, it was largely destroyed by bombing during World War II and has since been trying to reestablish itself with a serious architectural hat trick: The Sony Centre with its imposing pointed roof, the slick Mies van der Rohe-designed National Galerie and the Philharmonic orchestra building.

Film, art and classical music can all be found within this cultural square mile but since the area’s official renaissance in 1998, it has failed to create the type of environment that modern Berliners with an interest in the arts want to spend time in. While it used to buzz with early 20th Century bohemians, their contemporaries are reclining slovenly in understated Prenzlauer Berg haunts and rarely go near the declared tourist haven.  Singular visits to principal exhibitions or performances, yes, but the bohemian atmosphere has been sacrificed for corporate funding and the obligatory generic chain eateries.

The self-proclaimed cultural territory continues to tentatively spread its tendrils towards Friedrichstrasse. The Dali exhibition that toured Berlin (and Europe) to rave reviews has found a permanent home in a gallery on a chunk of Leipzigerstrasse. This stretch, still punctuated with the empty sockets of where buildings once stood, is slowly being appropriated and transformed.
AFP PHOTO/JOHN MACDOUGALL
Berlin, Potsdamer Platz : People enter a viewing platform and information booth about the Berlin wall on 30 January 2009. Germany will celebrate the 20th anniversary of the wall's fall on next 9 November 2009 with events planned all year-long.

My knowledge of Dali’s work was limited to his rich surrealist paintings. Rounded disembodied limbs and melting clocks are what come to mind when I think of the Spanish legend – the most clichéd associations.

This exhibition teaches the uninitiated such as myself about his plethora of drawings, watercolours and illustrations of legendary figures from Faust to Don Quixote.  I had feared that I would soon reach saturation point after roomfuls of Dali but his storybook images are completely enchanting.
Dali – die Ausstellung

               Dali – die Ausstellung

Dali took on legend and mystery with aplomb and the gallery plans to rotate the works on show (from the vault of 3,000 of his works available to them from various collections) in the hope of keeping die-hard Dali fans returning for more.

Potsdamer PlatzThe “Islands and Ghettos” exhibition is currently running in at the NGBK in Kreuzberg, with a parallel show at the Kunstraum Bethanien around the corner. Focused on the theme of social seclusion and isolation in modern cities, its location is pertinent to its surroundings given how this part of the city is rapidly changing and how its longtime residents – especially the Turkish community – are slowly becoming marginalized as the young professionals move in.


Carey Young is often the subject of her own photography herself and appears in these images of deserted, soulless cityscapes around Dubai. Suited, but seemingly purposeless, she walks along a stretch of broken stones in a building site and in another image curls up defeated on a chalky road. Poignant and haunting, the timing of the exhibition is also relevant given the fact that Dubai’s economic bubble has burst.

Sandow Birk – an often crass satirist of Western social and political culture – takes on the American constitution in a gigantic work that currently takes up a whole wall at the Bethanien.

He illustrates each amendment to demonstrate how the written foundations are failing sections of modern society.

Dali – the Exhibition (Dali – die Ausstellung), Berlin
Permanent exhibition

Islands and Ghettos
NGBK and Kunstraum Kreuzberg/ Bethanien, Berlin
Through April 26

The Elector Johann Wilhelm's paintings
Alte Pinakothek, Munich
Through May 17
 
The art collection of Johann Wilhelm of the Palatinate (1658-1716), who became Elector of the state in 1690 but chose to hold court in Düsseldorf, was recognised as far back as the 18th century as one of the most significant in Europe.

This treasure of the art-loving elector from the House of Wittelsbach was successively relocated to Munich between 1799 and 1806, and is today considered to be one of the highlights of the Alte Pinakothek. Reconstruction of the Elector Johann Wilhelm's painting cabinets, Detail, © Bayerische The collection relates, among other things, to the majority of the Rubens collection as well as to Rembrandt's Passion Cycle, Raphael's Holy Family from the House of Canigiani or to the more than twenty precious works by the Düsseldorf-based court painter Adriaen van der Werff.

Now, for the first time in 300 years, the full range of this highly famous Düsseldorf collection of Dutch, Flemish and Italian Baroque paintings will be shown at the Alte Pinakothek. The body of work is a sensual and fascinating panorama of collecting and representation in Baroque times.
 
 


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