Andrea Zittel & Marijke van Warmerdam & Cosima von Bonin & Per Kerkeby & Tal R Magasin 3 Konsthall Stockholm, Frihamnsgatan 28, 115 56 Stockholm SE. b

Andrea Zittel Lay of My Land. Marijke van Warmerdam Virvel Presentationer från samlingen Cosima von Bonin Per Kerkeby samt Tal R.

Magasin 3 Konsthall Stockholm, Frihamnsgatan 28, 115 56 Stockholm SE. by: craniv boyd

At  Frihamn, or Freeport of Stockholm, there is a re:appropriated industrial space, now in use as an exhibition venue for cutting edge, current art. Magasin Tre, is in a dark maroon brick building, the Konsthall, which is billed, both in the citywide marketing campaign, and in the identity of the institutions ephemera, in English, as hard to find but easy to love, is best entered by a narrow elevator on the first level above ground. 

Currently on view at this sober micro museum, with pristine white walls, and brushed polished concrete floors, are three exhibitions, which display  artwork in spacious rooms, that retain, nevertheless an intimate viewing climate.

Dutch Experimental Filmmaker Marijke van Warmerdam, is represented by a triad of floor to ceiling film to video transfer projected on to screen, cinematic, non-narrative-artworks. A bowed human head, bearing a long main of blond hear with dark curly roots, is the subject of the first of these non narrative film art works. It is a loop, with one camera angle. In line with the format of a repeating sequence of Film, the filmed subject, or actor, blows their flowing blond locks up with a calm jet of air. On the middle screen is a vista of a grassy floral filled hill, with a Black horse that sweeps it's tail back and forth. The third screen displays a view with mobile camera, maneuvering in a post industrial, dilapidated warehouse type space, over grown with weeds. A strong wind shakes up the dust, debris and fallen leaves. The high quality of the images of the film bespeak, that of 35 millimeter cinema, and what is a poetic musing on a Ghost town by, Marijke van Warmerdam, is provocative for an experimental film. I suspect that, the casual following of the leaves in the wind, or the subjective camera work, ambling down an empty, defunct, industrial space, is bolstered at all, by the cinematic tradition of 35 millimeter film. Most feature films for entertainment are filmed with this format, yet as an experimental film where no "action" in the Hollywood scene of the word is taking place, a certain air of legitimacy is conferred on this time based artwork, simply because it looks presentable sleek in-terms of image resolution.  

Never did ærial photographs of sub-urban-sprawl in the Nevada desert look so psychedelic, as with the wall paper by, American Artist, Andrea Zittel. The entree saal is a lavish, or knock out digital mandala.  In her one person, she is the only artist honored with the distinction of a two floor exhibition at Stockholm's Konsthall, Magasin Tre. Symmetrical photographs manipulated in a tasteful means, with Adobe photo shop, for: what creative professional would dare to utilize any other program? The artworks that represent Andrea Zittel are a motley crew of purposeful art, semi functional woolen clothing, book shelving, design sketches for said utilitarian art works, scale, topographical models of sheds designed for living in the wilderness of sunny California.   Eight of the desert shacks, customized by a selected grouped few,  of Andrea Zittel's like minded creative friends, are exhibited on the lower level. A live streaming video, of one of the shacks in situ in California, on Mrs Zittel's land, is projected onto a screen, via the Internet,  in the exhibition, in real time. Exhibition attendees are permitted to enjoy the limited privilege of being seated, within one of the customized shacks. The exception, being that visitors to Magasin Tre can listen to a sound art work on the head sets in the cabins. The other modules of the cabins are, delegated into a realm of refined display craft. The cultural artifacts from a genus of, of a Green minded creative cast. Perhaps as a time capsule, for a distant future, these artworks, that are decorative arraignments will bear some interest. Otherwise, as installation art, perhaps they are most useful, and applicable, to magazine spread maker or interior decorators stylist's, hand book of inspiration.  

Art work from a Konsthall that collects art. The curated exhibition, with selections from the collection of Magasin Tre is the most instructive, in understanding the collecting habits of a smaller Northern European institution for current art production.  The three artists in the selections from the collection, exhibition are: two Danish painters who either were, or presently are, fine arts professors at German art Academies, and one younger emerged German talent, who just so happens to be a woman born in Africa.  The oldest and there fore most established Dane, is Per Kerkeby, his hermetic, tooled bronzes of, enclaves and formations that bear resemblance to rock formations, are about surfaces and texture. Kerkeby's bronzes in this exhibition date from the early to mid 1980's, and that flange of his art-practice: non figurative and visibly high Modernist, at a time when post-modernism was a dominant guiding light for artists, helps Per Kerkeby appear as if during the 1980's he lived in one of the caves he carved in clay, then casted in bronze. Sculpture, that are all about the hand of the "master" artist hacking away at a thick clay maquette, that at times looks like earth, at other times looks like cavernous female genitalia, seem vapid and isolated, in contrast with the colleagues of Kerkeby's generation, like A. Keifer, or J. Schnabel, or S. Chia, or T. Craigg , or D. Salle. The cultural isolation, continues in the more recent, color full abstracted landscape paintings that share the same room. All of Kerkeby's large canvasses, are consistently vertically oriented , reminiscent of some damp or sun filled season in Denmark. The thin paint, the sameness of format, the bigness of scale have a mass produced factory feel, like a poster of a 19th century naturalist Danish landscape painter, which ironically must be a cliché from which Per Kerkeby seeks to escape by painting with a big brush expressively. Tal R, a fellow Dane,  of, a subsequent generation, who just  like Kerkeby, is very active within the Art landscape in Germany, is also in the same hall with Kerkeby. To further underscore the similarity of these Danish artists, Tal R, is like wise represented by sculptures on small modernist pedestals on the floor, and big heavy handed expressive paintings on the wall. The selection of two Danish artists who both create sculptures and make big and fast paintings, is eloquent as far as exhibition design goes. the art is hung and placed well in the space and seems made for the sober white cube of Stockholm's Konsthall, Magasin 3. Tal R makes figurative paintings with paint straight from the oil tube, decidedly unfinished with nude canvas of Napoleonic warfare. Waterloo appears in delicate graphite on the nude canvass. The bigness of the paintings takes away the children's book or coloring book feel to Tal R's candy colored interpretation of the horrors of total warfare. I wonder why dose Tal R not pick battles like Stalingrad, or selected moments from the first or second world wars, to candy coat and paint like toy soldiers or Christmas nut crackers? I take it, it because Tal R, clearly has the same kind of fetish A. Brevik had for  the colors and elegance 19th century military uniforms. Who can fail to like a man in uniform?

Lastly but not in any way the least, is the sprawling big and bold sculpture of a German woman born in Kenya, Cosima von Bonin. Her work is eclectic and spontaneous, has the haphazard and funky feel that things collide and just come together. An knitted woolen stuffed octopus with brown glass talons. A chair with a sound installation that plays a snippet or a micro clip of a electronica cannon musical Track. Music that is activated, by motion sensor, played by an overhead by speaker that hangs like a chandelier. A large canoe, atop plaid upholstered carpenters saw horses, the boat itself, sheathed in a patchwork of "oh-so-random" flea-market handkerchiefs, one with dandy, fancy, soldiers and a script that reads "Waterloo". Then some "paintings" which are doubtlessly conceptual in some manor of the word or another. The self conscious quilts, of cotton Kenyan shawls all the fashionable rage in Berlin Germany, are sewn together and framed on a painting support. The painting has some needle work with words that although some art viewer, may find either poetic or evocative of some exotic vista of a Farm in Africa, are empty. Mrs. von Bonin's art, those works that Magasin 3 in Stockholm has collected, have the empty international place less-ness, and anathema  of both content and identity that I imagine is the mainstay of Art Basel, Miami Beach. Cosima von Bonin's spontaneous art work is short attention span friendly, and not adverse to a capitalist existential question that precedes a spilt second decision of: to buy or not to buy.  However one hopes that the conceptual foundation of: von Bonin's art, eventually matures, and the concerns of her subject matter, clarify themselves or solidify. One wants of her art, that deliberate intentions posing as humorous random action, take on claimed purposefulness, and there by meaningfulness. by craniv boyd.

 

Jonathan Borofsky Molecule Man, Spree River, Berlin. by craniv boyd.

Jonathan Borofsky Molecule Man, Spree River, Berlin. by craniv boyd.

A triumvirate of veritable metal colossi, tackle one another on the Spree river in Berlin. Each of the three men of aluminum remain standing locked in a face on triangular collision where feet meet and hands or arms meld together. 

Perforated shining people together atop the river surface, stand as it were, impossible running on the water. Each of the men is a cookie cutter form at thirty meters in height, the three men in their artful fender-bender have silhouetted mouths agape as if to scream <Oh no we do not want to be re-united together! >

A sculpture in an open air-river-space. The same shape in triplicate fused, the section could be said to look like a "Y" form. Two of the masculine forms have their legs facing out south bound. the third male, meets them from the north, only to bump into one another with their many holes.

Truly tall Swiss cheese dudes who run on water in Prussia. 

Mammoth Siamese triplet, conjoined at the torso lands in Berlin, and runs around, hollering their heads off, attempting with several false starts, the tall task of finding their way home.

Men women and children can, and do feel free to navigate their small canoes and rowboats underneath the three pairs of severally pierced legs.

The buffed and polished and treated surface of the aluminum men taller than many, structures for living cheaply, in the Hauptstadt, catch the light of bright sunny days and reflect it, brighten up days with the clear-skies over Berlin.

Of the three, one: neither of these belligerents, in this æstetical conflict is sufficiently self complete to be neither a whole male silhouette, nor freestanding man-sculpture by oneself. These guys do not have arms. Only, legs, to propel their hurtling torsos, more forward bound, and thus deeper into the morass, in which they appear to grapple, screaming. The nexus of their collective collision course is the fulcrum which supports them, to each metal man of divergent trajectories, a common frozen terminus, and that fused endpoint, provides them, a source of stability. 

The angle of each of the figure's legs indicates moderate linear velocity. A sculpture, that  illustrates an improbable motion. Doubtlessly, the action, this art work depicts, would be a painful crash were it to occur between men of flesh and blood on a playing field. Oddly enough, though, that these, at times, see through aluminum guys, would hold a poised static grace.

A big heap of tin foil formed artfully towers over tourists who sojourn further past the bathing ship, or the arena. 

These three pale metal guys, are examples of: thought provocative, past-modernist, simplistic, bare bones, figurative artwork, that provides people an image of the human form, performing one basic task it tends to do best, walking. by craniv boyd.

  

Olaf Metzel, 13.4.1981 Spreespeichern Berlin-Friedrichshain. by craniv boyd.

Olaf Metzel, 13.4.1981 Spreespeichern Berlin-Friedrichshain. by craniv boyd.

Heaps of over-large red white and grey barricades tower over individuals visiting the Universal Records Office building in Berlin. Barricades are only recognizable: when the watcher, of this approximately eight meters tall sculpture in metal and stone, by German artist  Olaf Metzel, knows what 1980's vintage Berlin police crowd control systems&solutions look like. 

The artwork is a jumbling stack of crowd hindrance objects that are, at my guess twice their original size. The stack is made of modular parts, with the chaotic shopping cart with a stone in it thrown in at the top for good, counter-culture measure.  Surrounding the work that rests on the scenic banks of the spree river between two tall office buildings, are numerous rocks and chunks of formed concrete, smooth rubble left overs and remnants to sit and take your lunch out of doors or have your cigarettes with your coffee, weather permitting. The work is visible from the southern riverbank. Looking north from, what is still Kreuzberg, you can now peer over to what was, at one time in recent history, East Berlin, in the German Democratic Republic and see an impressive art work that it a deceptive and coy fooling of the eyes. The work when contemplated is both haphazard and organized in one fell swoop, because it model after photograph of protest.

Olaf Metzel created a statue, that bears the title 13.4.1981. The title of the artwork is a date. A day in a year that, to many, may still seem recent history. A unfamiliar date, with day preceding the month followed by the year, is cryptic, banal, insignificant and arbitrary. What national holiday falls on that day? Which kind of historically momentous occasion warrants the paean from Metzel in the form of mimetic overblown sculpture true to the forms, of both shopping cart, and crowd hindrance apparatus? The artwork that was originally made for a commemorative exhibition celebrating 750 years of Berlin city life, could perhaps be viewed as a celebration of all things Berlin, tumult and all. 

The art work is a permanent recreation of a oppositional protest that took place, some  30 years hence. It joins the ranks of the numerous, Denkmahl or Mahnmal, that populate the urban fabric of current Berlin today. Artworks given the at times pedantic task, to never let people forget, remind them of... in this case a protest in Kreuzberg a municipal district that was at one time, a hot bed for both migrant workers from Turkey and house occupants who took empty apartment complexes that people bought in long term speculation.

To adopt a cynical point of view, I argue that, 13.4.1981, is established art pretending like it is still hasty rebellion.  Placed abutting the office building of a record label who's bread and butter is youth culture, Metzel's art now possesses a look of: firmly rooted acceptable youth movement. 

Rebellion and youth movements in Berlin turn into, the sustenance and much needed inspirational nourishment of many belonging to a "creative" cast. The advertising agency, or the marketing firm, and all those in their employ haunting for the constant and fickle thousand-faced muse of übercool. That cast which subsume forces of creation at the grass roots level, to turn profit, and fill coffers of record executives and of course the respective trunks of an ever increasing bevy of vaguely talented recording arts talent.

Look a like  protest structure art work,  despite being large and ominous artwork, remains nevertheless fun to climb. Adult children enjoy the creature comforts, having reached the top to the art work by leaving their empty bottles of Beck's Bremen beer on the high up net-like components of the individuated barricade units. Not to worries the, unstable in appearance only, adult adventure playground situation facilitated by the climbable sculpture by Olaf Metzel, is both climb at your own risk and firmly fixed to the ground. by craniv boyd.

Sol LeWitt Structure 1994, Familiengericht Tempelhof-Kreuzberg, Hallesches Ufer 62, Berlin. DE, by craniv boyd.

Sol LeWitt Structure 1994, Familiengericht Tempelhof-Kreuzberg, Hallesches Ufer 62, Berlin. DE, by craniv boyd.

A jungle gym of sorts is placed, stationary on a grassy lawn outside a family courthouse, in Berlin Kreuzberg. It is a white, sculpted cube. All of its five visible sides are white square formed Bar stock, that make a grid. the jungle gym out side the office, is too sober looking to be approachable as a play structure. Regular intervals, and several white squares within a larger white square, provides the contemplative organized rational mood of art. twentieth century American minimalist cannon art to be particular. A name shield bears Sol LeWitt and title of Structure, (1994) tells most who can read, that this white cube, made of metal, in the grass is art. 

Minimal sculpture is simple to observe, slow, perhaps to understand or appreciate. If you are driving at a fast clip past family court, and looking toward the passenger side, at  Structure, by Sol LeWitt as many do in their daily, ways to where-ever in Berlin, then the Kinetic aspects of this stationary work move fast before your eyes. On a Bicycle, staring at Structure while moving would give the perceiver, a slower reception of the kinetic effects of this ground-bound minimal work. Running or walking, by contrast, again with eyes fixed on Sol LeWitt's work, the changes of the appearance of the work are less rapid, the shifting of the white bars, with their fire repellent paint, which do not move, due to the change in the vantage points held by observer, show that: the sculpture all though bland, innocuous or basic in appearance, is radically different looking, provided where you look from.

Crystal Lattice structure,is how iron atoms or other pure metals, would look on the molecular level. The organization of the squares, inside the white cube of Sol LeWitt's sculpture, Structure,  an artwork made of aluminum, is reflective of a Crystal Lattice structure. Despite hard edges, and geometric form, of this late twentieth century art work, its regular standard dimensions of five meters by five meters by five meters, that to most cultured art spectators, is a far cry from naturalism or realism in visual arts, Structure, mimics the form of the materials of which it is comprised. Begging a question is Sol LeWitt just another author of minimal art, that relies on mathematics, or is his math reliant art a new crop of Metal realist? 

Boring looking. White minimal sculpture out side of a family court, the placement, coupling of ordered artwork near a municipal court house, sends a signal. Stable vibrations in Structure, (1994), and monochrome flame retardant paint, give the impression of yes, you do possess the ability to climb this metal art work like a jungle gym, or an adventure play structure, but letting it be would be far more appropriate, because it is beside the family courthouse steps. Odd that minimalism, geometric art, would dovetail quaintly with municipal buildings of the law. The five meters large white metal lattice is an artwork, bearing a statement of, well-tempered transparent, freestanding  empty volume. by craniv boyd.  

Rainer Fetting Berlin. 15.04.-12.09.2011, Berlinische Gallerie Landesmuseum Für Moderne Kunst, Fotographie und Architektur. Alte Jakobstraße 124-128.

Rainer Fetting Berlin. 15.04.-12.09.2011, Berlinische Gallerie Landesmuseum Für Moderne Kunst, Fotographie und Architektur. Alte Jakobstraße 124-128. 10969 Berlin. DE, By craniv boyd.

 

 Behold! For, I am the accomplishments of an artist explorer! Seem to sing the paintings of, living German Expressionist painter, Rainer Fetting.  Large Format Acrylic, dispersion and Tempera expressionist paintings of content that is out-ly, blatantly vibrantly, almost, dare I write, militantly, homo erotic, paintings and prints on view at a National Museum, for Modern Art, cannot really be said to sing. Art objects, when existent as, pigments on canvass are silent, however the contents of Rainer Fetting's oeuvre displayed, are loud, as loud can get, for past modern painting.

 

View of the Berg's and view of a young man's all bare back:

 

A work titled I find you sexy, (authors translation), is a vertically oriented tableaux, which places on view a posing male nude, in harsh black contour lines that would be at home, let us say in a, Neo Gothic, Max Beckmann painting.  Naked dude has one arm stretched over his, neatly cut, short head of brown hair; he contemplates a vista of the Swiss Alps, or a Mountain range. The work is painted and is introduced to the public within the frame of this retrospective exhibition of a Berlin based painter, of the caliber of the young wilds. It is not without uncertainty that I view the painting I find you sexy, that shares a wall with the Male bathhouse content answer to Henri Matisse's eternal dance, motif. Observing the painting wonders if it is painted of a man standing in a Berliner Zimmer with a large poster of the Alps, or if it is rather made, created, inspired recovering after a dirty weekend in somebody's Châtlet. With that aside the connexion between the angular chiseled beauty of geological formations, remnants of the last ice age, and the musculature of the standing man, is formed by Fetting's brush with his application of a strong electric blue. In both the nocturnal sky, the back of the man, the stones of the expressionistic painted, mountains.    

 

 

CBGB's OMFUG, dilemma:

 

If you have not bathed in the sonic haze of the now gone baby gone, legendary, birthplaces of the punk rock and new wave youth movements on the Bowery, in Manhattan, than perhaps your understanding and empathy for, Fettings series Guitarist and Drummer, will be severely impaired. I for one hope not, the paintings are a superior quality meditation on syncopation in fast pasted emotional music; one is placed between the ears of a rock and roll drummer on stage, his fragmentary view of the lead guitarist. Fetting was there in the "scene" what ever that was when bands like the Ramones or the New York Dolls were playing there. This series is a painted record, a testament to the nascence of the Punk rock scene in New York City in the late 1970's and the early 1980's. How will a viewer feel when looking at an artwork about a sub culture rock and roll concert, when they have not been to such a kind of space?  Rainer Fetting does a great service to the raw energy that was in CBGB's, via his means of brilliant application of color.

 

Yo la Reyñia:

 

The art historical reference and the appreciation of the great master court painters of the baroque era, namely, Velázquez is both subverted, and supported brilliantly, Fetting paints a full-length portrait of himself, in Drag as the Infanta of Spain. The painting is lushly framed in a campy way, evocative of the popular presentation method of a Rembrandt or a Hals.  The strange thick and heavy paint application, as well as Fetting's bizarre color choice begs the question, just how serious about your love for the 17^th century Spanish master painter are you Mr. Fetting?  Yet the fun, large scale grappling with the cultural treasures, images, of the European powers that be as it were, is a tough and lively approach on how to make a self portrait as a painter living in Europe, while the Berlin wall is still up.

 

Color blind:

 

The exhibition is titled: Fetting Berlin, and in many ways the museum personnel are correct, in their basic, two-word-only, titling of the retrospective survey of a protean German expressionist painter. This exhibition is Berlin as seen by Rainer Fetting, it is as much Fetting as it is the divided city, Berlin, of the times when Fetting was living in that city, when the wall vanished or visa versa. The colors of the paintings are down right sexy, ample, many colors of the rainbow, and when used in fast paced, wet on wet painting, in the hands of Rainer Fetting, for city-scape's of a traumatized, amputated Urban landscape, you can truly feel the atmosphere that inspired David Bowie's song Heroes.  Drawings of the wall, painted by an artist who was standing by the wall, paintings of the Iron Curtain in its most concrete manifestation, in colors that look hallucinogenic, yet at the same time all too believable, wall jumpers and self-portraits, in the Germanic, melancholic tradition dating back to the gloomy painter print maker, from Nüremberg, A. Dürrer, this of self portrait with the wall. The Berlin wall, of 1977, the year of the date when the painting, was made, looks grey and depressing and the young artist depicted in vibrant colors forced into grey scale looks depressed as well.  By craniv boyd.

Lajos Kassák- Botschafter der Avantgarde 1915-1927. Berlinische Galerie Landesmuseum Für Moderne Kunst, Fotografie und Architectur, Alte Jakobstraße 1

Lajos Kassák- Botschafter der Avantgarde 1915-1927. Berlinische Galerie Landesmuseum Für Moderne Kunst, Fotografie und Architectur, Alte Jakobstraße 124-128, Berlin 10969. DE, by craniv boyd.

 

         Seeing works of a modern artist from Hungary, active at the time when, modern-ism and the isms where at their acme in Europe, is a rarity and a privilege. Lajos Kassák, and selected art, design and pamphleteering, work from the time frame of 1915-1927, is the subject of a modest gem of a retrospective exhibition at Berlinische Galerie.

 

         Cigarette propaganda, that contains the 19^th century art neveaux, naturalistic looking, cigarette smoker with the 20^th century supremacist, avant gaurdisitic geometric looking, smoker (think Pac-man) is in the same room as works by the French, sometimes surrealist, Francis Picabia and Dutchman Theo van Doesburg, of De Stijl. The fact that the retrospective of a messenger of the European avant-gardes active in Hungary helps to posit and teach that many European artists at the time, early twentieth century were in fact speaking the same formalist language.

 

Assorted ephemera are gathered behind flat display cases, and one needs only look to the, larger, more bombastic solo exhibition of a Canadian Artist living and working in Berlin now, out side in the Foyer or Entrée salle of Berlinisches Galerie, today to see the lasting power of, modernist type- and graphic design that, Hungarian: Lajos Kassák, and like proponents of a new style, like De Stijl. What is so striking is that the objects small political leaflets and manifestos with thrilling and new letter forms beyond rationalism, have a look both vintage and with the anything goes nature of graphic design today: neutral.

 

What, happens to the avantgaurdistic and socialist Utopian, content of a san-serif type authored by a Dutch modernist becomes the visual identity, for a prominent museum for American art, such as, the Whitney Museum for American Art in New York City?  Does san serif type still look communistic or rationalized fractur or black letter of 1930's, vintage look fascistic?

 

It is surprising to see the quiet presence and inspirational quality of lesser known, at least in central and western Europe, avant gaurdist artists form Hungary, and their continued relevance on art made today. By craniv boyd. 

Romero Britto Best Buddies Friendship Bear 2011. Dedicated to the city of Berlin by Eunice Kennedy Shriver in honor of People with intellectual disabi

Romero Britto Best Buddies Friendship Bear 2011. Dedicated to the city of Berlin by Eunice Kennedy Shriver in honor of People with intellectual disabilities who inspire their communities worldwide. Corner of Hedwigwachenheim Straße & Mühlen Straße, Berlin. By craniv boyd.

 

A candy colored specter watches over the remnants of the east wall of the Berlin wall. Large, weatherproof, enamel encased, sealed metal teddy bear on a pedestal, by Brazilian born, but as of late more Miami based artist, Romero Britto. The big bear statue has a colorful Siamese twin heart, one of glittering gold, the other of barbershop stripped pink and red. Fellow American post pop artist, with warehouse sized art fabrication facilities, Jeff Koons, and his ten ton seated Scottish terrier, made of potted plants, can go eat their hearts out. Because this large steel bear, Best Buddies Friendship Bear, may as, a work of sculpture, be employed to carry out site specific healing, a higher calling than: oh wow really big lap dog made out of flowers. As such the bright colored Metal Teddy evokes an emotional response that is altruistic, lavish and unexpected.

 

            The bear is a patchwork of bright patterns and of those patters, Romero Britto, has selected symbols from the heady fields of math and science, a brown and gold area, sports the symbol p, other shape accompany it but it's Greek to me, no worries, the playful setting of the symbols is approachable and not intimidating. The Bear is so bright and rich in patterns that it looks, akin to the mural covered East Side Gallery, which it faces. Yet the luster of the coat of paint on it speaks of factory finish, and large, prominent politicized art in the public arena, or more simple, urban fabric. It brightens up a rainy Berlin day near the former wall, just as well, as its candy chemical patina sings on a sunny day. 

 

If you are the type of person to weep at an inspiring R. Zemeckies film like Forrest Gump, (1997), then more likely than not the dedication, and Best Buddies Friendship Bear, as an artwork will touch you, rather than strike the chord of bad taste and terrifying Kitsch, that Romero Britto's work has the feeling of when viewed, in alternate art fair environs providing for an up close and personal in bulk, experience. One big metal bear for Berlin, one small step towards respecting and appreciating people with intellectual disabilities. A work of art in a high tourist traffic area near a shiny new multi-use stadium, is a light hearted awareness raising gesture to people with intellectual disabilities and or different ways of learning, who have to surmount those personal, setbacks and societal cultural ignorance for their tribulations. By craniv boyd.