absalon
Rarely is there such a happy marriage between art and exhibition space as in the recent survey of Absalon at Berlin’s KW Institute for Contemporary Art. Great white blocks of artworks sat scattered in arrays throughout the stark cavernous spaces, fitting as hand-in-glove. Even the heavens came to the party, coating the rooftops of Berlin in a thick layer of snow and transforming the view from the fourth-floor windows into the exhibition’s uncanny double—a field of primary geometric forms forced forward into volume, successive silent planes, perpendicular surfaces mute in their thick, unreflective whiteness.
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The exhibition is the first comprehensive presentation of Absalon since a similarly eponymous show at Amsterdam’s de Appel Art Centre in 1994—an exhibition which was initiated before and realised shortly after the artist’s untimely death at the age of twenty-eight. This time around the exhibition takes place amongst a dominant recuperative moment within Euro-American contemporary art and in the midst of the long-tail of Documenta 12 with its exploration of ‘minor’ art, in the Deleuzian sense. Significant attention has turned to a number of until recently forgotten artists such as Lee Lozano, Bas Jan Ader, William Leavitt and Guy de Cointet (of whom only one, William Leavitt, remains alive today to enjoy the delayed recognition).
Perhaps unsurprisingly within this context, the exhibition has been a great success for Kunst-Werke and its curator Susanne Pfeffer. The exhibition dates were extended, a major catalogue is forthcoming and an exhibition tour is currently under negotiation. However, even a confirmed art cynic would be hard-pressed to deny the eloquence of the exhibition’s display, or the oeuvre’s strikingly direct address to the viewer via its foregrounding of surface and