Last Tuesday, two new shows opened at General Public, an independent project space »run by a group of cultural workers«, located on Berlin’s Schönhauser Allee.

›Undigested Kernel (the super-saturated folk-art environment)‹ presents huge black and white wall paintings by US-based tattoo artist Scott Harrison. On those, the spectator finds the more multi-layered exhibition ›Alle Herzen fliegen zu‹.

Both exhibitions are shown at the same time on the same walls. Scott Harrison’s large scale skeletons and somewhat distorted animals leave a rather brusque (and yes, undigested) impression. The contrasts are bright, the surfaces are plain and the scenes are absurd: like a bearded carcass playing ice hockey. In return we were surprised by the rather small works the group show gathered and presented upon Harrison’s work. Playing with the notion of drawing in all possible aspects, the underlying materiality and the role of handcraft, ›Alle Herzen fliegen zu‹ assembles a broad range of artistic approaches: works on paper, enamel or tissue, made by hand or on the computer, drawings, paintings, writings and assemblages. The supplementary title ›Zeichnungen und Servietten plus Diverses‹ (drawings and tissues plus miscellaneous) says it all: There was a lot to discover.
How did these completely different exhibitions fit toghether? The story is quite simple: General Public invited the tattoo artist Scott Harrison, who was not terribly interested in having a solo art show. He decided that other works could be hung upon his wall paintings. And that’s what happened. The second exhibition combines various coups de coeur of the curators Cristina Gomez Barrio and Wolfgang Mayer. It shows surprising interactions with the walls they’re presented on. The contrast between the large paintings and the smaller, more subtle works emphasises both approaches.
We really liked the colour contrast between Ulrike Müller’s neon kind of kidney shaped painting and Scott Harrison’s ›Ja, ja‹:


Also, the curators chose an intresting text-based work by the painter Amy Sillman, represented by the gallery Carlier Gebauer: it consists of a simple chart, tracing some characters that are gathered around a table for a fictive (or non? you never know) Frieze dinner. Very fun to read. And probably a little true.


Last, the idea of authorship, art and handcraft culminates in the works of Jan Rohlf. A very impressive drawing made by hand that looks alomst mechanical is shown across from works he actually designed digitally. The minute differences trigger a chain of thought evolving around such discourses as man vs. machine. Pretty big subjects for such small works.

The artists presented in this show are
Ulrike Müller
Michael Mahalchick
Amy Sillman
Cristina Gomez Barrio
Catriona Shaw
Urania Fasoulidou
Wolfgang Mayer
Berthold Reiss
Anne Roessner
Jan Rohlf and
Discoteca Flaming Star.
Both exhibitions will be displayed from May 20th to June 7th, 2009 at General Public.