So I have been in Berlin one whole week already, I think that my time here will go very quick.
As well as meeting old friends and making new ones I have been looking at a lot of Art.
On Saturday I went right up into Wedding, which is an untrendy part of the old West Berlin. There in a defunct Osram factory there between the usual fashion outlets and furniature stores are a couple of very large scale galleries, . At Galerie Guido W Baudach, there was a show by Thomas Zipp, a large scale spatial installation of wooden buildings, or rooms that on entering were completey mirrored.
I enjoyed the experience of being in there spaces as a few days before I had visited Charlottenburg Schloss and was very inspired by the Porcelaine Cabinet of Queen Sophia Charlotte.
This completely exotic cabinet is actually a whole room designed purely to display the Queens porcelaine collection. The cieling is painted with a mural of Aurora chasing away the night (which I could write a thesis about), and, as in all the rooms in the Baroque part of the Palace the painting turns into sculpture which enters the space. The walls are covered with chinese porcelaine, held out to us by chinese figures, cups sit on sculpted tree branchs, and plates in the laps of smiling buddhas. The whole thing is outrageous. But the thing that interested me most in this room was the fact that mirrors in the corners of the room extended to collection into imagined space far beyond our reach. I started to think of ways in which I could use this technique with the doll collection.
The other thing that struck me at the palace was the way they had painted the ceilings in rooms where the original murals had been destroyed during the war. There were just clouds, the heaven above. This seemed to fit with my thoughts about the sublime, an archetectural sublime, filled with fantasy rooms where we can touch the exotic. The exotic of other cultures including the extravagent past of the Hohenzollern dynasty.
The gardens here are very interesting, I shall have to go back and film and photograph.
Yesterday I visited several exhibitions, Roman Ondak at the Deutch Guggenheim and some small galleries in Mitte, but the highlight for me was to go into The Altes Museum and see the Casper David Friedriechs. They are beautifully hung here and having been studying them in books for so many weeks it was really fantastic to stand before them. Some I find strange and beguiling, some not so interesting. A couple just astound, there is something much more contemporary about them, in the same way that through Turner we see the shape of art to come.
In the studio I have started to make a series of small watercolours from the photographs I took in Mauer park, and in the mornings I run through this landscape to try to fix it through my body. This work, combined with the Friedriechs seems to be consolidating ideas born 4 years ago when I made the Char Dham pilgrimage in the Himalayas. The image of a small figure fixed against a vast landscape. This is what I was hoping for in Berlin, but I am not sure how it will resolve into solid shape yet but it is very exiting though.
