In the exhibition Solo for … Dan and Lia Perjovschi the ifa gallery Berlin presents two artistic positions that combine image and text in very different ways, respectively commenting upon current affairs from their own approaches.

Dan Perjovschi responds with his spontaneous, stylised, almost comic-like drawings to current socio-political conditions. Daily, Weekly, Monthly is a retrospective of Dan Perjovschi’s magazine works. His political, social and cultural news are always highly topical, depicting human society of the 20th and 21st century in a humorous and critical way.
Dan Perjovschi (born 1961) participated in the exhibition Erste Schritte – Rumänische Kunst der 90er Jahre (First Steps – Romanian art of the 90s), presented by the ifa galleries Berlin, Stuttgart, and Bonn in 1993.

Lia Perjovschi’s large-scale installation Knowledge Museum Kit is an imaginary project of ideas for an interdisciplinary museum, a base project for those who want to know what should be known. Creating imaginary contexts, the artist raises existential questions and reveals unexpected connections. The interplay of image and text evokes an endless mind map, where text fragments and image material are interwoven in associative structures.
Lia Perjovschi (born 1961) participated in the project Balt-Orient-Express presented by the ifa gallery Berlin in 1996 and subsequently shown at the Romanian National Gallery in Bucharest and the Kunsthalle Exnergasse in Vienna.

Today the Bucharest-based artist couple participates together or individually in renown international exhibitions like the Venice Biennial or at the MoMA New York.

Solo for … Dan and Lia Perjovschi

Lia Perjovschi: Knowledge Museum Kit
Dan Perjiovschi: Daily, Weekly, Monthly
Dates. 03.02. – 15.04.2012
ifa Gallery Berlin
Linienstrasse 139/140, 10115 Berlin

In cooperation with the Kunsthochschule Berlin Weißensee:
06.02.2012, 7 pm
Lia and Dan Perjovschi
Lecture: Double Experience – life and art from dictatorship to democracy
(Lecture in English)
Kunsthalle am Hamburger Platz
Gustav-Adolf-Strasse 140, 13086 Berlin

Photo: My Yourope, 2010, Bucharest for project intervention at E.U. Parliament Strasbourg, France, and insert in Revista 22 Bucharest, Romania (detail), © Dan Perjovschi

He achieved international recognition with the Singing Lesson (I) at the 2002 Frankfurt Manifesta and with Repetition at the 2005 Venice Biennale, a powerful metaphor of our regressive democracies in which the state of exception has become the rule, according to Benjamin’s terms, which Agamben has made famous. Artur Żmijewski is curating the 7th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art which is to open soon (April 27 – July 1, 2012).

Artur Żmijewski continues the artist-talk series HUMBOLDT MEETINGS, to which Christoph Hochhäusler (12 December 2011), Angela Schanelec (10 January 2012), Anne Tismer (31 January 2012), Harun Farocki (NEW DATE:  7 February 2012), and Thomas Ostermeier (15 February 2012) have been invited to open discussions at the Department of Art and Visual History at the Humboldt University of Berlin.

The dialogue series is organized by Régis Michel (Rudolf Arnheim Visiting Professor 2011/12) and Katharina Lee Chichester

HUMBOLDT MEETINGS III
Invitation to an open discussion with Artur Żmijewski
Podium guests: Charlotte Klonk and Piotr Piotrowski
Tonight, January 23, 2012, 8 pm
Humboldt-University of Berlin
Dorotheenstraße 24, Room 1.101

With the kind support of Carolin Behrmann and the students of the seminars

HUMBOLDT MEETINGS is realized by the Department of Art and Visual History at the Humboldt-University of Berlin.

John McWhinnie, book lover, dealer, and publisher, died earlier this month. McWhinnie, who specialized in counter-culture ephemera and art publications, was a huge presence in the insular, obsessive New York art book scene; in addition to the wonderful shop he ran with Glenn Horowitz, McWhinnie consistently had the most engaging booth at the New York Art Book Fair. The photographer Peter Sutherland has posted an unpublished interview with McWhinnie on his website that makes clear that investment savvy is no replacement for a true, deep, meaningful passion. At the end of the interview is a list of his favorite books, and, predictably, it’s one of the best I’ve ever read.

Photography by Peter Sutherland

Which reminds me of a little happy encounter with Another Country bookstore in Kreuzberg, where I wanted to depose of some English books. The owner, a rather eccentric Englishman, separated them studiously into different piles, with Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho making one pile of its own. The owner told me what he would pay me for each pile, then said, ‘And for this, you will have to pay me one euro,’ pointing at Psycho. ‘Some books are so evil that I cannot sell them at my store, so I burn them in my backyard. This is one of them and it will cost you one euro.’ I thought it was a fair price. This is the reason why you should always go to local stores, since they are still run by humans, not corporations. Talking about politically correct.

Imprint’s August Heffner reports the exciting news that the Guggenheim has digitized a host of out-of-print catalogues. This is wonderful news: not only are these publications valuable scholarly resources, but together they form an inspirational treasure trove (no surprise, considering so many were designed by Herbert Matter). Look at that Klimt \<>/ Schiele cover!

120 Stadiums

Every Baseball Diamond in Manhattan

Jenny Odell collected some stuff for us, using Google’s Satellite View, and frames it nicely with a notion by Hannah Arendt:

…because human existence is conditioned existence, it would be impossible without things, and things would be a heap of unrelated articles, a non-world, if they were not the conditioners of human existence.

Need a change in 2012?
We recommend the SLIMTARRA wallpapers!

SLIM means clever, smart, cute in Dutch. And SLIM means slender or thin in English.
TARRA (Dutch for tare weight, empty weight, dead weight) is a nice word, like DADA or ANNA BLUME.

Every little while Extrapool in Nijmegen (Netherhlands) invites artists to design a SLIMTARRA wallpaper. The wallpaper design is printed by Knust, Extrapool‘s renowned stencil print workshop, and is then exhibited on one of the walls in the Extrapool building.

SLIMTARRA has been running since about the year 2000 and the number of different SLIMTARRA designs seems to be endless. In contrast with usual wallpaper, which mostly comes on long widths of paper, SLIMTARRA wallpaper consists of many individual sheets of paper: the stencil printer restricts the paper size to an A3 sheet, so each SLIMTARRA design must fit onto a 420 x 297 mm page. This, of course, influences the pattern and appearance of the final design, allowing intricate misshapes and misalignments, giving the SLIMTARRA wallpaper its slightly irregular, charismatic aura and adding the charm of slight failure to each SLIMTARRA. It also offers the possibility to play with turning the sheet, and by doing so, varying and changing the final pattern of the design.

Get an impression of the individual walllpapers in the SLIMTARRA catalogue.

Wallpaper Design above by Zoe van Horen

Helen Frankenthaler, second-generation Abstract Expressionist and painterly innovator, has passed away. After studying art at Bennington College, Frankenthaler met and dated the preeminent modernist critic Clement Greenberg, and found her way into the burgeoning New York art scene of the 1950s. She met leading artists Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, and her future husband, Robert Motherwell, and quickly developed her artistic practice. Inspired in part by Pollock’s drip paintings, Frankenthaler began pouring paint directly onto raw canvas, staining it with large swathes of color. This technique galvanized subsequent generations of painters, including Kenneth Noland, Morris Louis, and other members of the Color Field movement. Frankenthaler was 83.

Above: Canyon, 1965, acrylic on canvas