Daimler collection, Berlin

One of the highlights of my visit to Berlin (a month ago) was the "Drawing Sculpture" exhibition at Daimler Contemporary, which is on the 4th floor of this old building - the survival, it seems, in the modern morass of the Potsdamer Platz area.The Daimler corporation (they make Mercedes cars) has lots of art in their various buildings; this gallery is open 11-6 daily, with free entry. The collection specialises in 20th century abstract art. The Drawing Sculpture show presents a selection of works on paper, about 60 works by 28 artists dating from about 1960, "staging dialogues between classical Minimalist positions from the 1960s and international contemporary art" (says the leaflet).

A complete list of artists: Leonor Antunes, Eva Berendes, Hartmut Böhm, Monika Brandmeier, Christo, Katja Davar, Gia Edzgveradze, Ulrike Flaig, Adolf Fleischmann, Marcia Hafif, Lasse Schmidt Hansen, Rita Hensen, Georg Herold, Oskar Holweck, Claude Horstmann, Markus Huemer, Robert Longo, François Morellet, Rupert Norfolk, Silke Radenhausen, Eva-Maria Reiner, Jan Scharrelmann, Oskar Schlemmer, Jan J. Schoonhoven, Auke de Vries, Andy Warhol, Georg Winter

During the two hours of Saturday morning that we spent there, Erika, Wendy and I saw only two other visitors. Some of the sculptors in the photo below are by Dutch sculptor Auke de Vries; the red drawing that Erika is looking at is a response to music, but I can't remember either the song title or the artist, only that she started at top right - which you'd have to read the label to know, and which does make a difference in how you look at/understand the work.
In "the lawn from behind", use of thread (stitching) is entirely appropriate - everyone handling a piece of embroidery automatically turns it over, and here the artist has anticipated that - and made you think about the grass growing, probably?
Another great thing about this exhibition was the labels - an informative, readable paragraph (in English as well as German); I photographed them to re-read and think about later. Photography, without flash, was permitted.

Eva-Maria Reiner's Scherenschnitt (2001) was fascinating, enlivened by the coloration brought about by the natural lighting on the right and artificial lighting on the left. (Crisper photo here.)
These works "which she started in 2000, are based on a different way of handling the human body's volumes and outlines. The Scherenschnitte start y measuring the circumference of parts of the body, and these are also listed in the title of each particular work. The number of individual body part measurements fixes the number of strips of paper to be arranged one behind the other. The circumference measurements then define a circle. Reiner calls these circles 'first circles'; they are cut out of the pieces of paper. A mathematical formula then produces a meanvalue for other circles, and cuts are made in the paper on this basis. Thus three-dimensional, irregular body forms are reduced to a disciplining and exemplary system. Reiner's morphometrics exist on the narrow ridge of two-dimensional drawing and three-dimensional relief. The absence of real physical volume creates the mutually involved presence of body and space - via the views into the holes and the realtionsip of the paper layers to the architecture surrounding them."

Also fascinating was Silke Radenhausen's "Arabian No 1" (1996-2003)- "canvas, laundered, colored" -"In technical terms, Silke Radenhausen's 'topological cloths' come under the heading of the relief but add moving surfaces which result from cutouts in the canvas and circles, triangles, squares or ellipses sewn in. The works relate to Owen Jones' book 'Grammar of Ornament' which - arising from the encyclopedic 19th century thinking - propagated the availability of the form concepts of different cultural spheres on a massive scale. The artist defines and shows the ornament as an autonomous object whose shape appears to support the dogma of Minimal Art: a mathematically precise, pure object form instead of spatial illusionism. And yet semantics of material and shape return to Radenhausen's work: her material/sculptural treatment ventures to touch on the spheres of decoration, of crafts and thus of traditional feminism."
In the background is Georg Herold's "Ohne Titel" (2002) - "one of a series of showcases in which Herold places all kinds of objects like balloons or technical devices. Load and support of the simply made work are so finely balanced that the shelves and contents, despite that rough material quality, seem very fragile. The grouping of the pumice stones follows the physical laws of gravity, friction and elasticity. The material form captures an element of movement, and also includes an imaginary sequence of events in space and time. "Gebogene Latte V sets higherto unsolved problems of virtual representation to work in a highly coarsened form. The media mix makes it a hybrid, 'coarse-grained' object, whose origins got lost in the zero gravity space of a monitor surface [Bildschirmoberflaeche]."

Probably my favourite piece was Dark Text (2006) by Claude Horstmann.
The label says: "Claude Horstmann's working material is language. She collects words from newspapers and magazines, when travelling by bus or from conversations, and then works them into new, independent texts and represents them visually through the medium of drawing. Horstmann's inspiration for Dark Text was the little slips of paper in Asian fortune cookies, where she was particularly interested in the interface between widespread objectivity and sudden subjectivity. "Everyone knows that it is pure chance what sentence you find in these cookies, but everyone hopes at the same time that they will contain a grain of personal truth. I am interested in the moment when the text opens up this field of ways of reading lying between objectivity and subjectivity, between common property and something special. The aspect of relativity is particuarly relevant to the question of when and how a sentence becomes meanningful or not." (Claude Horstmann) The sentences crossed through with a broad, black paintbrush illustrate these two planes: the text is concealed, like its meaning, which has to be discovered individually."

A small room painted grey showed some of the "loveliest" works - drawings by Marcia Hafif (American, born 1929, known for her "pigment paintings"). At that point I wasn't taking too many photos because my camera battery was getting low. More on her work in a separate post.; here you can see "January 1972" - an example of the mark-making on large sheets of paper that she did regularly. Here is an essay from the catalogue of her 2003 exhibition.Here we learn that in 1972 "Marcia was drawing vertical pencil marks, as a kind of meditative exercise into standard black drawing books. She started at the upper left corner and worked systematically down the paper. Then she began to use words instead of lines, but words semantically unrelated to each other. She tried not to make sentences or phrases, used no punctuation, left no margin, line breaks were contingent on reaching the right hand edge of the page. You saw a wall of penciled words."

The Daimler collection also comprises sculptures in the vicinity of Potsdamer Platz - by Robert Rauschenberg, Keith Haring, Jeff Koons, Nam June Paik, Auke de Vries, Jean Tinguely, Francois Morellet, Marc di Suvero.

On 10 February, should you happen to be in Berlin, there's a talk about the sculptures: "the architect Roger Baumgarten, who supervised the building of the Potsdamer Platz under Renzo Piano, will tell us about the integration of the sculptures into the city. All the different aspects of how the sculptures' locations were chosen, the technical challenges involved and the pieces' artistic significance will be presented in detail."

The exhibition is on till the end of February 2010.