Black sunbeams on white paper. What happens is what happens when you get too close to the celestial body – everything that is material burns up. Monika Goetz’ expansive “Burnt” is one of the most impressive works at the Paper Positions fair. Two plain strips of white paper, five meters long, stretch across the entire booth of the Schwarz Contemporary gallery. The internationally acclaimed artist, who likes to play with fire, uses laser technology to burn the stylized rays onto and into the material. Energy supply and movement speed determine the haptic qualities and the color nuances, fine lines alternate with cracked areas, flat surfaces with curves. Which gives the overall composition a fascinating tension (8800 euros).
There is a prize for the best booth
Actually a candidate for the Leue & Nill Award, which honors an outstanding gallery presentation. This year, the financial injection (50 percent of the stand rent) goes to the Berlin art dealer Malte Uekermann, who conceded at the award ceremony that the artist Jens Hanke was responsible for the design and that the prize therefore belonged to him.
The painter and graphic artist, who was trained at the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig, lets the wind whip through wild vegetal structures. The expressive charcoal formations are underpinned by a Morse code with quotes from TS Eliot, which ends in a blossom-like color section. The stylistic antithesis are Hanke’s construction drawings, which are reminiscent of concrete things, but leave them in the attractively possible (5500/2400 euros).
The award would also have suited the installation design at Semjon Contemporary. Ursula Sax transformed the stand into a total work of art. Why equip the trade fair appearance with salable small formats if the sculptress, who will soon be celebrating her 88th birthday, wants to realize artistic concepts. Sax reproduced the photograph of an oversized fold, had it printed on wallpaper and papered the entire stand. The ornamental overflow is complemented by two large-format sculptures (each 16,000 euros) made of yellow and blue painted packing paper from GDR stocks, which emphasize the volume in the room.
The highlights of the Berlin Paper Art Fair
On the opening evening, Ursula Sax was awarded the prize she deserved: the Paper Art Award in gold for the life’s work of the “grande dame of sculptural paper art,” said Annette Berr, founder and director of the “House of Paper” in her laudatory speech , which also highlighted Sax’s pioneering role for women in the arts. With the total of 36,000 euros in prize money, purchases are made for the museum every year. Silver goes to the South Korean Gisoo Kim (Mianki, Berlin) and the Spaniard Amparo Sard (Anita Beckers, Frankfurt/Main), bronze to Brian Dettmer (USA) and Ken’ichiro Taniguchi (Japan), artists from the Hamburg galleries Commeter and Mikiko Sato .
Highlights of the seventh edition of Paper Positions, which, with a total of 56 exhibitors from twelve countries – including Anna Laudel from Turkey, the O Gallery from Iran or the Japanese Cave-Ayumigallery – and its clear salon atmosphere allow you to immerse yourself in the cosmos of the medium .
Thole Rotermund from Hamburg offers woodcuts by Franz Marc, the affordable price of which is around 3400 euros thanks to the authorized reprint. In addition to graphics and a watercolored postcard by Lyonel Feininger (19,500 euros), George Grosz’ 1921 pen and ink drawings “Emigrants in Berlin” (64,000 euros) score points, which are strikingly topical in view of the political developments in Russia – they whisper deeply: ” God bless the Tsar”.
“Painting women” of classical modernism, Dr. Nöth art trade in the program. These include Lotte Laserstein, Paula Modersohn-Becker and Tamara de Lempicka’s “Portrait of a Young Woman” (78,000 euros), drawn with a subtly smudged pencil.
The third exhibitor specializing in classics is Kunkel Fine Art from Munich, with art from Berlin during the Weimar Republic. A delightful “Ménage à trois” (€65,000) by the caricaturist and illustrator Dodo stands out in a range that is somewhat incongruously flanked by contemporary photographs.
The bandwidth of the material in contemporary art, which once again forms the focus of the fair, ranges from Ulrike Königshofer’s “Graphs” (Reinthaler, Vienna) – in which the sun draws lines on photographic paper exposed with a pinhole camera – to the three-dimensional, extremely fine ramifications of Kathrin von Lehmann’s (Kang Contemporary, Berlin) and Bodo Korsig’s shadow plays at Māksla XO from Riga to Hans Schimansky’s abstract drawings at Inga Kondeyne or traditional paintings such as Aneta Kajzer’s charmingly dazzling series of “Night Shapes” between comic and dream creatures, which the 1989-born in Poland Painter with oil paints on handmade paper (12,000 euros, Galerie Conrads). Michaela Nolte
