Hotbed Berlin

The first such sighting is in a joint show at the Villa Grisebach Gallery, where lvar Beyer and Katharina Ismer create geometric abstractions that compliment and contrast with each other. While Beyer paints architectural, structured, yet softened shapes that evoke urban structures and 1970's patterned design, Ismer crafts complex nature scenes of free-floating lush, leafy branches and piles of kindling, interspersed with patches of solid, bold, synthetic color. Ismer's intent is plainly to combine forms from architecture, interior design and nature, but in her images the standing trees and stacks of cut wood often override her references to man-made structures. Strikingly, the forms in the Diepholz-born painter's images become more apparent and interesting in close proximity to Beyer's color-fields, while the strict design, clean lines and cool colors in the Weimar-born Beyer's paintings calm the implication of chaos and the gestural feel of Ismer's dense, clashing constellations of forms and color.

For example, Fontainebleau, a 2006 painting by Ismer, at first presents a straightforward, simplified depiction of trees growing along the side of a concrete road. At closer examination it exposes the whimsical illogic of the image. The trees are not planted by the grey zig-zagging pattern but on it. One of the trees seems even to be sprouting from behind or from within a tilted turquoise square, which could be read as sky, but in its actual position adds a surrealistic element of mystery to the scene.

Where Ismer's abstraction expresses the cluttered conflict between man and nature, Beyer cleans it all. Beyer, who doesn't attempt to ground his forms in any obvious worldly reference point, might not play with the laws of gravity or the logic of nature so blatantly, but his light colors and the soft perimeters of his forms add a joyful aspect of randomness to the paintings' otherwise precise geometry. Beyer's 2005 ArchitekturI consists of lines of color - black, grey, peach, and tangerine - streaking across an all-pale cream colored canvas like a highway.

Cognitive dissonance between the rigorously simplified functional aesthetic of the traditional Shaker crafts and the frenzied religious excesses expressed in Shaker gift drawings is represented through Lisa Lapinski's sculptural found-object installations at the Johann König Gallery. The California-born and based Lapinkski's work is rooted in ontological reference points as her sculptures act as physical representations of metaphysical concerns. Before receiving her MFA from the prestigious progressively post-modern Art Center College in Pasadena, California, Lapinkski had studied philosophy at the University of California and her sculptures have included overt references to historical events and modernist philosophy such as Rimbaud's trips to North Africa and Wittgenstein's theories. In the past, the 38 year-old artist also recreated psychologically loaded spaces such as a psychiatrist's office.

“Fine Evening Sir!” is Lapinkski's first Berlin exhibition. By means of the drawings and prints, but also with Nightstand (2005), the sculpture she showed in the 2006 Whitney Biennial (and which had originally been created for Johann König's former space on Weydinger Straße) she appropriates and replicates drawings as well as craft techniques from the Shaker tradition. Shakers are a New England-based off-shoot sect of Quakers, whose faith is founded on their belief in celibacy (they have maintained their numbers through conversion and adoption) and a pure, sparse lifestyle devoid of frills or frivolity. Crafts are a major part of the Shaker tradition and their pared-down, streamlined, minimalist wood furniture has become an admired and highly collectable part of the American Colonialist heritage. But the furniture's austere appearance and formalistic focus on functionality is in sharp contrast with the Shaker's ecstatic, physical rituals. The name 'Shakers' is derived from the trembling, shouting, dancing, shaking, singing and speaking in tongues that permeate the group's religious ceremonies.

Lapinkski not only reproduces Shaker crafts and casts her objects in off-setting scenes; she also combines them with incongruous items that represent softer, lighter, more conventional, secular lifestyles. Birds, which are among the few reoccurring symbolic signatures of Shaker art, are represented here by framed reproductions of Hungarian-born French artist Gustave Miklos's Art Deco sculptures of birds. Thus, a dainty white porcelain lady's hand, the kind crafted for jewelry display cases, sits on a slat of the glossy wood as an emblematic representation of the gaudy, unnecessary decoration the Shakers reject, while on the apex of the sculpture is perched a drawing in primary colors of a witch. The ironic standpoint summoned up by the light, whimsical kitsch details of the jeweler's window dressing and Miklos's decorative images magnifies the Shaker aesthetic's emotional polarity, where order and madness, exaltation and calm, and weight and significance, are constantly juxtaposed in everyday life.

Venezuelan artist Javier Tellez's video installation The Battle of Mexico at ARRATIA, BEER gallery dispenses with symbols of the sublimation of madness. First shown at Mexico's Museo Carrillo Gil, Téllez's video was made in collaboration with the patients of Hospital Fray Bernardino in Mexico City and shows some of them dressed as Zapatistas in camouflage and ski masks forming a militia overrunning the psychiatric hospital. Téllez, whose parents were both psychiatrists in Venezuela, has made mental illness and science's attempts to cure its sufferers the focus of his work since the nineteen-nineties. In the 49th Venice Biennial, he showed a video documenting the effects of Huntington's Chorea on Lake Maracaibo, the part of the world with the highest concentration of the illness, where there is yet no health care for the ones who suffer from the terrible, debilitating and deforming disease. The nightmare issues of illness exacerbated by maddening social neglect are satirically presented in The Battle of Mexico where the patients fictionally overthrow the institution by staging an armed protest against the mental health system's injustices. In this fantasy, the mad are fighting against the illogic of organizations that are intended to help them but stigmatize and degrade them instead.

Other stigmatized elements in society are beautifully represented in Oliver Pietsch's exhibition. The windows to the Goff + Rosenthal gallery are blacked out and a sign by the door responsibly warns visitors that the exhibition of four films of appropriated re-edited material made by 32-year-old emerging Berlin-based video artist Pietsch are not suitable for children. Goff + Rosenthal, another New York gallery to join LA's Peres Projects in bringing the hottest American art to Berlin, consists of two strikingly distinctive exhibition spaces split apart by a slender stairwell walkway. The storefront main space is an attractive white-walled two-roomed gallery and office area, while the project space is a raw, brick, low-ceiling, intimate area in the back. The contrast promises a series of arresting juxtapositions between the artists on display.

In the gallery's rough back room, oversized silk brocade pillows are strewn over a faded Persian rug, creating a cosy yet decadently dilapidated seating area summoning up old opium dens and harems. That is where the gallery screens Pietsch's forty-five-minute-long film, The Conquest of Happiness, a sinisterly sweet and seductive homage to addiction. The film consists of an elegantly edited stream of more than three hundred drug-related video clips which Pietsch selected and spliced together over the course of two years. The clips span the history of film and range from recognizable Hollywood films to documentary material and images from obscure indie archives. Pietsch organizes them substance by substance, offering a series of scenes showing actors snorting cocaine before beginning his chapter on heroin, and so forth.

The images move along to a soundtrack which includes slices of dialogue and music. In each instance, Pietsch first isolates the ritual preparation of each drug. He then often skips directly to the moment immediately after the user ingests the substance, when relief and ecstasy wash over his or her expression. Most of the movies he draws upon were intended to be hard-hitting cautionary tales about the consequences of drug use and abuse, but Pietsch avoids didactic moralizing. Instead, he allows the excess of images to bear down on the viewer until the final clip, which gently reminds us how unrealistic our escapist expectations really are.

Pietsch's Hit Me is different from his other films because it focuses on violent relationships between men and women, not the solitary relationship between an individual and his or her own death. The film starts with a vintage black-and-white clip of a Japanese body builder poising and preening, while a voice-over names his muscle groups. It ends with the interview scene from Boogie Nights in which Mark Wahlberg's character defends himself against accusations of misogyny with the incoherent justification that, 'if there is a certain amount of violence, a certain amount of action, in the films, than that is the movie.'

In Hit me women are slapped for apparent comic effect or brutally beaten, but Pietsch establishes a connection between the suicides in his other two films and this aggressive form of violence by including images of overt masochism. The music in Hit me is a lament to lost love and often the women, such as Isabella Rossellini in Blue Velvet, register obvious arousal when their men's fists hit their faces, and by linking these films together, Pietsch seems to be saying that love or Eros can be a form of suicide for women. The pattern that emerges from the short films ultimately articulates the same overwhelming awareness of misery, excitement, determination and release that Pietsch also conveys in his show's longer, solitary film, The Conquest of Happiness.

Between Goff + Rosenthal's screening areas, another homage to hidden desire is located - Scottish-born, London-based artist Kevin Francis Gray's black, cast resin sculpture, Hold Tight. The two male figures standing on a platform engraved with a Satanic star with hoods pulled low over their heads and spills of black beads pouring down over their faces seems ominous at first. But it becomes disarming when one notices that the men are holding hands. Yet far from being animated by Hummel-like sentimentality, the sculpture is a darker, mature yet still sweet image of lovers on the down-low.

Again in contrast to the tactile reserve and spiritual fervour illustrated in Lapinkski's Shaker work, the 34-year-old Swiss photographer Raffael Waldner presents icily detached, digitally manipulated photographs of destroyed luxury goods and an installation consisting of his own mangled Porsche for his debut solo show in Germany at Spielhaus Morrison Galerie's new location on Heidestrasse behind the Hamburger Bahnhof. Waldner altered Sites, his series of pseudo-documentary photographs of car-accidents that he appropriated from Zürich Police archives, by digitally removing the vehicles from the images. Even in the absence of any real evidence of destruction, the images he presents are still ominous. In one image, what appears to be a benign landscape turns out to be a mound of rotten food. Waldner's image of an imaginary country made from uneaten food is a cynical but sadly accurate rebuttal to the prevailing ideal of global interconnectivity. Here he illustrates the global reality of waste, in which the discarded and decaying excess of one country literally forms the reality of other countries.

More overtly sinister is Waldner's series of photographs titled Disgraced Objects. In the seven images from this series, he tightly frames his sharp, arresting images of luxury objects as trash with all the stylish fetishism of hip fashion photography. But in an art context, his images do not ironically highlight the desirable features of the objects he desecrates. Instead, the conflation of seductive imagery and wilful destruction spotlights the arbitrariness of objects of desire. Waldner's image of an Omega Speedmaster watch with the "scratch-resistant sapphire crystal" that the Swiss company boasts about on its glossy website shattered against oily black concrete shines like a genuine anarchist gesture. Perhaps the sense of entitlement and flippancy that squandering something with such recognized high value requires is in fact an ultimate luxury.

Or perhaps it celebrates the freedom to live decently, yet meaningfully, on a smaller scale. If rejecting luxury's icons is a more honest vision than the coveted items that Waldner shows to be frail and transient, then Berlin itself, as it enables its artists to live and create, is indisputably a city to be really valued.

ANA FINEL HONIGMAN is a critic and PhD candidate in art history at Oxford University.