ArtReview’s newsletter #14

Michel Majerus, Pathfinder, 2002, digital print on vinyl, 380 x 290 x 4 cm. © Michel Majerus Estate, 2002. Courtesy Neugerriemschneider, Berlin

 ONE 
Computer world

Michel Majerus died in a plane crash in his mid-thirties in 2002, but this exhibition showcases how, as time goes on, the Pop [removed] of his computer-driven paintings, prints and videos has become ever more prevalent. Two years ago, Majerus’s estate acquired his former studio at Knaackstrasse 12 in Prenzlauer Berg and had it architect-overhauled to contain his sizeable archive. Here it’s opened up for the first time, with guest curator Charles Asprey – who, as half of Asprey Jacques Gallery with Alison Jacques, showed Majerus in London during the 1990s – effectively bookending the artist’s professional life by combining pieces from his last two years with works from his student days in Stuttgart.
Michel Majerus: Beautiful Way, 25–28 April at Knaackstrasse 12

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Mandla Reuter, Natural Spring (detail), 2013, trench shield, coffee machine, 350 x 100 x 16 cm. Courtesy Croy Nielsen, Berlin

 TWO 
Electric café
The ever-classy Croy Nielsen is showing an exhibition by Mandla Reuter, who’ll be furthering his philosophic interest in the many meanings of ‘land’: as real estate, as property and as geographical physicality. For the South African-born, Berlin-based Reuter, land is a hazy category, as emphasised by his showing of diazotypes (old-fashioned blueprints) that, exposed to light, become blued, empurpled and pinkish voids. Elsewhere, look out for the latest of the artist’s works that relate to fountains. In 2011 Reuter presented 5,000 litres of water from the fabled Trevi Fountain in Rome. Here he’s presenting a hybrid of a fountain and a coffee machine – fully functional, we hope!
Mandla Reuter: Need Better Address, 26 April – 1 June at Croy Nielsen
 

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Alicja Kwade, Nach Osten, 2011, five speakers, microphone, amplifier, electric motor, pendular, lightbulb, dimensions variable. Courtesy Alicja Kwade and Johann König, Berlin

 THREE 
Swinging it
Young Polish artist Alicja Kwade is turning the brutalist interior of Werner Düttmann’s St Agnes Church in Kreuzberg, latterly purchased by Johann König, into an installation recasting Foucault’s famous pendulum – albeit with a lightbulb where the weight should be and a microphone fixed to it, amplifying the sound of its movement. This dramatic son et lumière spectacle is full of contradictions and counterbalances – not least that it isn’t a pendulum at all but an electrically driven, kinetic [removed];
Alicja Kwade: Nach Osten, 27 April – 26 May at Johann König (at St Agnes Church)

 

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Toby Ziegler, Maud, 2013, oil on aluminium, 180 x 222 cm. Photo: Todd-White Art Photography, London. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin

 FOUR 
Buried treasure
This show of recent paintings and sculptures by British artist Toby Ziegler, with titles taken from the names of sunken ships, charts his rewardingly zigzag aesthetic from crisply precise paintings on metal, in which landscape imagery glimmers through scrims of geometry, to ungainly paint-decorated sculptures. What unites them is a shared hidden core of technology-driven making processes, the sculptures being 2D images morphed via 3D modelling software, and the paintings being produced first on computer. Ziegler’s pixellike marks create images that zoom in on the deep painterly past, their source material being fragments of Old Master still lifes by Memling, Zurbarán and Mélendez. In play are the slippages between figuration and abstraction, two and three dimensions, and architecture and [removed];
Toby Ziegler: Borderline Something, 26 April – 1 June at Galerie Max Hetzler
 

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Ugo Rondinone, Primal, 2013 (installation view). Photo: Andrea Rossetti. © the artist. Courtesy Esther Schipper, Berlin

 FIVE 
Clocking off
Ugo Rondinone is known for employing an ambiguous sense of space and time, so here expect, first of all, to be unsure of what the gallery space is being used for, thanks to some substantial interference with the flooring. Second, bank on a lot of bronze horses. And third, anticipate not knowing what time of day it is. No word if invigilators are confiscating watches and mobiles on the door, but for a Swiss person, Rondinone seems to have a strange – or perhaps wholly logical – aversion to timekeeping… 
Ugo Rondinone: Primal, 26 April – 30 May at Esther Schipper