Art Forum Berlin: We Are Somebody Again
The 15th edition of the Art Forum was, compared to the energy of Frieze just one week later, a relatively staid affair — and that was not necessarily a bad thing. As always, the event was held at the Messe Berlin, the monumental exhibition hall built by the Nazis — and notably used as the setting of this fall’s luxe Bergdorf Goodman’s catalogue. The adjoining Palais am Funkturm’s terrace café, formerly a 1950s social haven, has now been re-opened, and the stars aligned this year to bring the competing abc (art berlin contemporary) exhibition to the nearby Marshall-Haus, an undulating, mid-century gem built by the Americans under the Marshall Plan for the German Industrial Exhibition.
The opening day fair crowd, dressed almost exclusively in black and gray, was manageable; the art on display was mostly good quality and non-experimental. Some very nice pieces, no real surprises. The highlight of the main hall was a Douglas Gordon installation at Yvon Lambert (allegedly purchased by a European collector for $500,000) and Contemporary Fine Arts’s solo show of Max Frisinger’s vitrines filled with Berlin junk. A signature Neo Rauch canvas could be found at the reliable Eigen + Art, and London’s IBID Projects offered a captivating Christopher Orr painting. Bright, geometric works by the late Dane Poul Gernes (a discovery at last year’s fair) with healthy price tags were available at both Copenhagen’s Galleri Bo Bjerggaard and Berlin’s Ben Kaufman. (A retrospective of Gernes work opened concurrently at Hamburg’s Diechtorhallen.)
In terms of layout, the younger Focus sector was moved from the periphery to the core of the main hall this year, and the twelve young dealers selected were allowed to invite another emerging gallery to exhibit. That’s how Tanja Wagner — a Max Hetzler protégé in business for less than two weeks — found herself with at booth at the very hub of the fair. She was gleeful.
A walk (or golf cart ride for some VIPs) across the verdant garden dotted with white contorted benches by Danish artist Jeppe Hein led to the abc show, a rival yet cooperative event staged by the founders of the very successful Gallery Weekend now held each May. Curated by Marc Gloede and called “light, action, camera,” the exhibition aimed to demonstrate the influence of cinema on art — and inadvertently provided a flashback to the first Berlin Art Forum a decade and a half earlier when every other booth had a video rolling and many insiders were proclaiming painting to be dead.
But even with two other younger events now in the game – Preview Berlin held at the now-defunct Tempelhof airport and Berliner Liste at the former state mint — the ambitious vitality that had characterized the fair during the 1990s was absent. With a preponderance of Northern European galleries, Art Forum Berlin seems to have settled into being a respected yet more regional event à la ARCO and FIAC.
Back in 1996, as Berlin was still in the thick of the post-Berlin Wall rebuilding frenzy, thirteen German dealers banded together to initiate the new art fair. This move was both a protest and a leap of faith. A challenge to the once-venerable Art Cologne which had become bloated and without focus, and an attempt to re-establish Berlin as the cultural metropolis it had been back in the days of the Cassirers and Herwarth Walden’s Sturm. The Berlin upstart, would be a smaller fair (about half the size of Cologne), would be easy to navigate, and would concentrate on works produced after 1950.
The time was ripe: the federal government had just narrowly voted to abandon Bonn for the city on the Spree, a few Cologne dealers had already bravely relocated there, and the artists were steadily infiltrating the empty apartments, shops, and factories left vacant in the Wall’s wake. While the city had no collector base, the world-class historical collections established during the Kaiserzeit — even if still divided in the former two halves of the city – were there, providing the city with art historical bedrock.
During the early years of the fair, the tension was palpable: how many galleries from the Rhine would defect from the mother ship? How many international galleries would participate – meaning, after the WWII devastation and Cold War isolation, could “provincial” Berlin ever become a truly cosmopolitan capital again? Could the city resume its role as the bridge between East and West, a true Weltstadt? And without any collectors at home — would anything sell?
Back then, Art Forum Berlin had momentum, energy. New York and London galleries, dealers from Asia and Slovenia entered the mix, collector groups from San Francisco and Minneapolis showed up, landing at the Paris Bar late in the evening and returning in throngs when Christo and Jeanne-Claude wrapped the Reichstag in 1997. The crescendo was reached around 2003 when the fair’s organizers put VIPs up in the stylish new Grand Hyatt Hotel on the reconstructed Potsdamer Platz. And then came Frieze in 2005. And the energy shifted.
So it was a shot in the arm to step out onto the Palais am Funkturm veranda this year, the blast of fall sunshine and high-squirting fountains a reminder of those merry black-and-white postwar photos of 1950s revitalization. It was on this very patio at the Messe where, once the war rubble had been cleared, Berliners dressed in suits and tea-length crinoline skirts gathered to enjoy a communal coffee or cocktail under the umbrellas, to celebrate what they referred to as Wir Sind Wieder Wer or “we are somebody again.”
True to its original mission, the Art Forum Berlin 2010 was a focused affair. And, fifteen years down the road, the gallery scene in Berlin has burgeoned beyond what anyone could have imagined, the splendid public collections are reunited in exemplary starchitect renovations, the city is touted in The New York Times as nothing less than the cultural capital of Europe, and hundreds of creative young people from Brooklyn and around the globe are pouring in each year. Berlin is no longer in the throes of becoming; it has arrived. And Art Forum Berlin no longer has anything to prove. It may not be the top edgy European fair, but – with its tight, professional presentation and intriguing architectural backdrop –it is somebody.