Published on 29 APR 2026

Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi is considered one of Berlin’s most respected and influential contemporary art galleries. Representing more than 30 artists across emerging, established, and historical positions – including Wu Tsang, Ed Atkins, and the estate of Carol Rama – the programme is defined by its openness to new aesthetic languages and a commitment to artists working outside dominant narratives. Questions of the body, language, vulnerability and political tension run through the gallery’s exhibitions with an urgency that engages the central questions of the present. Founded by the Italian-born gallerist Isabella Bortolozzi in Mitte in 2004, the gallery later moved to Schöneberger Ufer, where it remains today. In 2014, a second space, Eden Eden, opened nearby on Bülowstraße.

Even though your gallery has been around for over 20 years, I read somewhere that you still felt like an “outsider”. Is that still the case?

I have said this in the past, but on reflection, I think, perhaps that it may be less specific to Berlin and more about my relationship to the dominant culture in general. Given the current global political and cultural situation, I think this feeling is shared by many.

Your programme often brings together artists whose practices don’t fit established categories – Gisèle Vienne, for instance, moves between many disciplines. What draws you to this kind of work?

There are multiplicities in perspective and practice and to be relevant as an artist is to somehow embody this reality. Gisèle Vienne is a dramaturg, a choreographer, a director and a sculptor. Her practice is layered and complex, which is precisely what attracted me to her work in the first place. All these layers structure a unique world, neither central nor peripheral, and one to which I am attracted. To quote Gabriela Acha´s review of Gisèle’s exhibition “This Causes Consciousness to Fracture”, 2024, in Frieze: “Vienne is a choreographer, narrating with bodies even when they are static objects. Vienne uses this voicelessness, the radical stillness in her teenage puppets to develop a discourse around violence.” Her first solo show at the gallery is coming up in September during art week and it promises to be precise and radical as her shows always are!

You said once you’re drawn to the “politically wounded body”. What artists embody that for you?

What I said in an older interview was slightly different: that it is the political wound on the body that interests me. There are only bodies and the body of objects and ideas, which are also produced by bodies. I guess you could say I am not so interested in certain kinds of bourgeois elegance and the ornaments that frequently pass for art.

Often there’s a sense of heightened vulnerability or sensitivity to many of your gallery exhibitions, would you say that’s emerged intuitively?

One could say that vulnerability is a condition of our times. It’s a subject artists dealt with in a gallery show last year called Bedroom, Christmas Morning, featuring works by Ellen Cantor and Annie Ernaux & Marc Marie. We showed original hand-printed photos by Ernaux & Marie alongside the video If I Just Turn and Run (1998) by the late Cantor. The photos were taken in tandem by Ernaux and Marie for Ernaux’s book, The Use of Photography. At the time, Ernaux was undergoing chemotherapy for breast cancer while having a love story with the journalist Marie. As she writes:

“(…) as if making love were not enough and we needed to preserve a material representation of the act, we continued to take photos. Some we took immediately after lovemaking, others the next morning. The morning pictures were the most moving. These things cast off by our bodies had spent the whole night in the very place and position in which they’d fallen, the remains of an already distant celebration. To see them again in the light of day was to feel the passage of time.

When you first opened the gallery, how did you go about putting together a programme?

I think that’s something very personal that has to do with yourself, it’s connected to one’s desire and how this desire changes over time. A programme reflects the disposition of your being, rather than an attempt to constantly anticipate the next commercial opportunity (such attempts always end in tears!) Back when I opened the gallery in 2004, I did not have a business plan, and it was not a particular moment besides the fact that I decided to “jump”.  I opened the space with a show by the Slovakian artist Julius Koller. Julius’ symbol was the question mark, and I asked him to draw one in the space – a question mark was a good start for a gallery.

When you first come into contact with an artist’s work, what are you looking out for?

I like work that evades capture in some way. Work that is not obviously in the service of some familiar intellectual, formal or aesthetic agenda. If I think about Ed Atkins, Hannah Black and Seth Price but also Diamond Stingily, Vaginal Davis, Steve Reinke and Calla Henkel, one of the things that connects the artists I work with is writing and language. I think that my role as a gallerist is to remain always open to the unknown and to create the conditions in which others can share the opportunity. I try to clear the space for the emergence of something new.

To what extent do risk and difficulty guide your decisions about who you work with?

These attractions are not strategies, they are not the means by which you fashion your position, they are drives that carry you forward. The direction is determined by the drives, wherever it leads. 

You began working with Carol Rama well before her wider recognition – what did you recognise in her work?

One of Carol Rama’s early exhibitions at the gallery was titled Autorattristatrice (“Self-Sad Maker”), after an incredible early painting of hers that looked like a rubber flower and which we presented in the show. Carol Rama received the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale in 2003. She belongs to the great European culture of the twentieth century, yet for decades she was marginalised and suppressed, particularly in Italy. It was up to us to make peace with her, to write on her behalf and to tell her story. To recount Rama’s story is also to speak the story of this repressed and alternative strand of Italian art, which had to be rewritten and retold: radically different and sincere, radically complex and complete. Carol Rama didn’t like natural light which is an interesting thing for a painter to dislike. She painted always with artificial light. Giorgio Manganelli, one of my favourite Italian writers wrote a short essay on her work titled Light and Darkness in 1979, in which he described her paintings as coming out from the night, like a fluorescence or a cold combustion. He described Carol Rama as powerful and scared. When I met her a few years before I opened the gallery, she was already known but I felt she needed a retrospective to rewrite her story, so I started a conversation with Paul B. Preciado at MACBA, Barcelona. It led to the retrospective The Passion According to Carol Rama at MACBA 2014, which closed at the GAM Museum in Turin in 2016. I now co-represent the estate with Hauser & Wirth. 

You were also instrumental in bringing renewed attention to Vaginal Davis, long overlooked by major institutions. What convinced you of the significance of her work?

Amelia Jones refers to Ms. Davis’s practice as “Anarchic Abundance”, José Esteban Muñoz calls it “Terrorist Drag”. It is a fact that a “terrorist” does not circulate easily in institutions. Her distinct way of seeing the world emerges through this constant destabilisation – using exaggeration, vulgarity and contradiction to expose what lies beneath social norms. As Bojana Kunst described in her essay, “Precarious Glitter: The Many Revolutions of Vaginal Davis”: “Vaginal Davis is not just one, she is always more than one. Vaginal Davis is plural with her multitude of appearances avoiding the appropriation under singular value. Her early bands, collectives, friendships and alliances are not just anecdotes or life stories of the artist’s biography, they are the social essence of her work. (…) It is precisely through the exuberance of desire, alliances and love that Vaginal Davis’s work resists the emotional poverty and misery that characterises contemporary modes of life under late capitalism and its control over the creative forces of life.”

At times your gallery has been described as less a fixed aesthetic programme and more an evolving set of ideas. Do you think of the gallery this way?

An evolving set of ideas is a nice way to describe the gallery’s programme, I like this and it’s kind of true. I would also add that there are many connections and collaborations which are born in between the artists in the programme, for example James Richards & Steve Reinke are long-term collaborators even before we started working together, Wu Tsang & Vaginal Davis are close and knew each other, Calla Henkel & Max Pitegoff collaborated with Diamond Stingily and Leila Hekmat. So the evolving relations between the artists themselves as well as the programme, reflect these conditions.

How involved are you with artists while they develop an exhibition?

I like to be involved in the exhibitions of course, sometimes I am more involved and sometimes less. Sometimes I prefer to let things unfold, to allow for the event to seize its moment alone.

You occasionally show artists outside your programme, such as Chakaia Booker. Are you interested in how those practices work alongside the artists you represent?

Sometimes they do not have much in common, but this reality makes the meeting more interesting. In the specific case of Chakaia Booker and Carol Rama, both used the same material: car tires, but whilst Booker’s tires are a metaphor for post-colonial issues, slavery, class, race and labour, for Rama car tires and bicycle tires have a different connotation which is of a more subjective nature and are connected to her personal story.

For Gallery Weekend Berlin, you’re showing the painter Adam Gordon. What can visitors expect?  

The exhibition feels like a single organism, each work contributing to a subtle tension between presence and absence. I think it’s that quiet instability that makes his practice so compelling. The artist treats painting as spatial and experiential rather than purely image based. His works don’t just depict rooms – they activate them, leaving a lingering atmosphere, as if spaces carry psychological residue. I’m particularly interested in how he constructs this effect through layering, staging and the control of perception – both within the paintings and in their installation.