Art Fairs
The 20 Best Booths at Art Berlin Contemporary
See a snapshot of the hip Berlin fair's best art.
Alexander Forbes
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Art Berlin Contemporary (abc) kicked off its seventh edition in the German capital on Thursday. The fair’s 2014 outing is its second under the direction of former Art Basel communications director Maike Cruse and the fourth year it has stood alone as Berlin’s single major fall art event, the city’s Art Forum having been canceled after its 2010 edition.
In all, 111 galleries are gathered at the Station Berlin—Art Berlin Contemporary’s home—this year, presenting 115 single artist positions across three halls. It’s a marked reduction over the previous year, which saw 121 artists presented by 133 galleries. (Some galleries collaborated on booths, a trend that continues in this edition as well.) The reduction is noticeable. Works are more spaced out. Many are also larger, with particularly monumental installations by Kristof Kintera, Karsten Födinger, Yorgos Sapountzis, Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, Julian Göthe, and Kerim Seiler, among others. It gives the fair an ever-closer resemblance to Art Basel’s Unlimited section for large-scale works to which it has often been compared.
For the second year, abc has incorporated an extensive performance program into its four-day run. Forty of the fair’s works feature performance, sound, film, or theater components. In its first hours, John Bock could be seen whipping up some relational aesthetics out of pineapples, gummy worms, raw eggs, and sliced bread. (His gallery, Sprüth Magers is showing four artists at abc.). Christian Jankowski was set to make dancers of the fair’s Mini VIP car fleet. Others, such as Jocelyn Wolff’s Diego Bianchi or Brand New Gallery’s Donna Huanca, incorporated durational performances directly into the works on show throughout the fair’s run.
Take a tour of 20 of Art Berlin Contemporary’s best works in the slideshow, above, presented in no particular order.
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