BEHIND THE SCENES:
BERLIN

Part I

Gallery weekend

11, 12 September, 2020

Everything takes longer now, including the decision to fly to Berlin after so many months staying home. Last year spent real time there with our collaborative Art & Language exhibition at Galerie Michael Janssen; I missed my friends, artists and colleagues. It seemed a moment to celebrate the last project MJ would mount in this great storefront gallery I love. They just now moved to offices down the block until a new gallery space is found.

Super fresh painting. Till Gerhard, We’re all like Mirrors, dreamy and exciting surprises galore. Not the kind I usually embrace, but suddenly, in this time, having spent months looking at art only in my library and on my laptop, the sheer delight of his unique convergences, color and narrative, wicked and magical at the same time; partially recognizable scenes, photo albums from long ago family outings, or odd Scandi Noir television moments. His taut ambivalence between innocence and destruction drives their pictorial nature into something compelling.

Acid colors, transparent veils over quasi-photographic imagery either come in or out of focus. Sometimes the subjects are directly in your line of vision, walking at you, staring at us blindly. What are they doing? Something unsettles the eye and sets it deep into the foreground looking for clues.

Groups of children, or adults caught in another reality where something has just happened or is about to. His night scenes of lovers in a lake hover under psychedelic skies. Washes of color across Gerhard’s work are high voltage and filmic. His subjects dissolve in and out of focus; painterly prisons of layered color like camouflage keep us from getting too near what is going on. But he makes me want to see, keeping my eye fixed on this unsettled territory. Idiosyncratic voyeurism couched in radical painting. Keep looking.

PART II

Customary dinner outside at Paris Bar the night before the opening of Till Gerhard’s show. I stay around the corner always at the Savoy, a habit since 1997 when Thomas Schulte booked me there in the Marlene Dietrich suite for 75DM; we shared a booth at an early edition of Berlin Art Fair. I was MD at LISSON then, wanted a satellite in Berlin. Walking in Charlottenburg I always felt oddly at home. Many dinners and parties always at Paris Bar. Maybe then still homesick for the New York art world dinners at Barocco in Tribeca, a place where there were always people you knew, at the bar, at a table.

Paris Bar is this, like the Kunsthalle in Basel, or the Kronenhalle in Zurich a place you can go alone and always fit in; the waiters are the same, the menu is the same, the art on the walls and reverence for artists makes it feel like an extension of the gallery or artists studio. So this year after months at home, sitting with Till and Michael outside for dinner, like a genuine holiday yet also an extension of the last time. Nerves taut the night before an opening. The show is up, the work lives or dies on its merits. Few people say anything about how hard this feels. Even for a gallerist who hopes to place the works well. Expectations run high, fear mounts higher. Without a word you finish the installation, and leave the gallery looking for relief.

Dinner is my first meeting with Till Gerhard, lanky tallness and physical calm; I am surprised after hours with his fiery, edgy, nervy paintings, feeling dangerous. He is soft-spoken and thoughtful. Easy going, experienced, one would say, artist entering mid-career. His fourth show at the gallery with a place in the German art scene, but is new to me. I try to contextualize his work in a neighborhood with artists I once worked with like Daniel Richter and Jules de Balincourt. He is near but still quite far his piercing melodramas embrace an oddness you cannot decipher.