![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() The more traditional buildings in the courtyard are now, predictably, packed with smaller galleries as well, including Side by Side, 401 Contemporary and the art consultancy GoArt!, run by curator Miriam Bers and Stefano Gualdi. After an extended renovation, it reopened in April 2012 with a Jonas Burgert show, kicking off a series of blockbuster exhibitions like the museum-quality show featuring Arte Povera legend Jannis Kounellis in autumn 2012. Though Berlin is full of good spaces, to have such a central location on this scale was irresistible.”īlain/Southern, a familiar neighbour with a new venture, took the next-door space and christened it (in a still-rough state) with a Tim Noble and Sue Webster show in April 2011 (alongside a launch party for Frieze d/e in Judin’s space). “I couldn’t resist the natural light and the proportions of the rooms. “I came across these buildings long before they were for rent,” says Judin, whose artist roster highlights lots of meticulously made two-dimensional work by artists such as Dexter Dalwood, Adrian Ghenie, Peter Saul and Danica Phelps (Judin lives nearby, in a revamped 1950s petrol station). “I came across these buildings long before they were for rent” Juerg Judin, a Swiss gallerist who scouted the original Haunch of Venison space on Heidestrasse (which opened in 2007 and closed in 2010) and later launched Nolan Judin there in 2008, secured a long-term lease on the vast spaces with impossibly high ceilings. In mid-2009, the Berlin daily newspaper Der Tagesspiegel moved out of its Potsdamer Strasse complex, including halls where the printing presses (ta-da! – instant industrial chic) ran. These days not all of the spaces are so intimate. It was as if Berlin’s go-go mid-2000s art scene had had the same reality check as the global financial markets, and gallerists were perhaps looking for more intimate spaces to downshift, to contemplate or, as Klosterfelde says, to “make the artists work with a different kind of space”. It wasn’t long before other galleries began settling into small storefront or courtyard spaces on the side streets of Kurfürstenstrasse and Pohlstrasse: newer dealers like Tanya Leighton, Sassa Trülzsch, editions and multiples specialist Helga Maria Klosterfelde and veteran Giti Nourbakhsch (who’d actually been the very first to arrive here, in 2006, but closed amid unclear circumstances in early 2012). Along the nearby Schöneberger Ufer canal, Bortolozzi began showing her edgy program (including artists like Danh Vo) in a noirish apartment lined with dark wood panelling. Matthias Arndt moved into a similar space across the street, upstairs from the Wintergarten theatre. “We came here because it was completely different,” says Martin Klosterfelde, whose gallery occupies a grand beletage apartment at Potsdamer Strasse 93 with ornate wood mouldings and French doors – a dramatic departure from the white cubes he had on Zimmerstrasse. Interestingly, some were leaving white cubes for more residential spaces, most tucked into back courtyards or on upper floors, ie, nearly invisible from the street. The migration first became visible in 2009, when several of Berlin’s prominent galleries – like Isabella Bortolozzi and Klosterfelde – rather quietly moved not east, as had previously been the trend, but west, to a nondescript neighbourhood incorporating parts of the Tiergarten and Schöneberg districts, south of Mies van der Rohe’s glass-box Neue Nationalgalerie and traversed by the broad Potsdamer Strasse. The most recent cluster, however, looks different – slower, more eclectic. For the past 20 years, gallery districts have cropped up and disappeared like fairy rings in the forest. I arrived too late to experience the first post-Wall art hub on Auguststrasse, but watched gallery migration occur under bridges (Jannowitzbrücke), behind landmarks (Checkpoint Charlie), in an old department store (Lindenstrasse), on a grotty side street (Brunnenstrasse) and in industrial halls along smelly canals (Heidestrasse). In unified Berlin, it has long seemed so. Must art-driven gentrification always follow the same trajectory? The one in which artists colonise cheap spaces in an industrial area, gallerists follow, restaurants and bars arrive to keep everyone fed and happy, then people with more money ‘discover’ the place, chasing prices up and the artworld out – only to repeat the cycle elsewhere? ![]()
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