ai weiwei
know thyself

Christinenstraße

Ai here continues his extended engagement with imagery created from Lego bricks to reassess, de- and reconstruct or contextualize anew works from throughout art history and the contemporary media landscape. Using a traditionally playful, immediate, generationally and geographically ubiquitous medium to analytical, critical extents, Ai shapes a veritable survey of both the Western cultural canon and of his own artistic trajectory.

Ai Weiwei at neugerriemschneider

Throughout his body of work Ai has returned to Lego bricks time and again, laboriously harnessing pieces by the hundreds of thousands to interrogate the parameters of imagemaking and production, honing his use of the material and expanding its representational and theoretical capacities to shape facsimiles of well-known works of art and other popular media. Honoring Marcel Duchamp and his legacy of the readymade, Ai deploys the mass-produced objects for adaptations of preexisting motifs, translating and often modifying them within his own social and political contexts, the angular components mimicking the pixels that coalesce to become today’s digital, widely and infinitely distributed imagery.

 

For his exhibition at neugerriemschneider, Ai presents eight such interpretations in Lego. Know Thyself (2022), which lends the show its name, finds its base in a mosaic from the first century CE, initially discovered along Rome’s Via Appia and now housed in the city’s Baths of Diocletian. Ai makes use of vanitas messaging, along with the imperative to “Know thyself,” written in Greek, to existentially, life-affirmingly reflect on the complex interfaces, contrasts and overlaps between past and present, while morphing the source’s irregular four-sided tiles to their modernized analogs.

Pollock in Black (2020), a cornerstone of this same exploration, is constructed on the basis of Jackson Pollock’s One: Number 31, 1950 (1950). The original’s energetically choreographed, nearly calligraphic applications of oil and enamel paint are converted here, in nearly one-to-one scale, to a binary of either black or white, with the now-aged canvas portrayed in a single shade of grey. Within the context of Ai’s own development, the Pollock stands as emblematic of his immersion in American post-war art during his time spent living in New York between 1983 and 1993, and illuminates a formative facet of his practice.

With The Last Supper in Green, The Last Supper in Blue, The Last Supper in Pink and The Last Supper in White (all 2022), Ai draws upon Leonardo da Vinci’s mural of the same name housed in the Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, casting each iteration in modified color palettes directly reminiscent of the silkscreen prints by Andy Warhol that crystalized Ai’s conception of the entwined nature of art, its history and its contemporary media landscape. In each Last Supper permutation, the face of Judas is replaced by that of the artist laughing, building upon the art-historical tradition of self-inclusion, and positioning Ai himself as an agent of disruption, making explicit his fraught relationship with the Chinese government.

Ai Weiwei at neugerriemschneider

Ai Weiwei, Water Lilies #2, 2022, lego bricks, 268 x 1530 cm © Ai Weiwei, Courtesy the artist and neugerriemschneider, Berlin, Photo: Marjorie Brunet Plaza

Continuing the exhibition’s showcase of masterwork-derived compositions is Water Lilies #2 (2022), devised in reference to Claude Monet’s early 20th-century series of monumental paintings. Portraying a meditative tableau from the storied Impressionist’s meticulously crafted gardens, Ai’s Water Lilies #2 spans three walls and a length of over 15 meters. Its scale and form cast the work as all-enveloping, allowing for a viewer’s complete absorption in its intricacies. Punctuating the right-hand side of the color-shifted composition is a rectangular door—the entrance to the subterranean home in which the young artist and his father, poet Ai Qing, lived after being driven into exile in the late 1950s, transforming the work through autobiographical, intergenerational dialogue.

For Nord Stream (2022), Ai departs from reproductions of canonical works and turns his focus to a contemporary news photograph showing the result of the ruptured Nord Stream 2 natural-gas pipeline—a nearly frame-filling whirlpool set against a blue field of waves that encapsulates over two decades of heated international relations. Here, Ai brings to mind his own career-long political involvement and activism, expanding on his past work around migration to Europe across treacherous waterways, and questioning the dichotomy between international concern for human lives and that for resources and capital. The image itself and its large-scale maelstrom possess a visual magnetism, wavering between abstraction and representation in a mode that alludes to both the Pollock and Monet tributes on view.

Ai Weiwei at neugerriemschneider

Ai Weiwei, Nord Stream, 2022, lego bricks, 154 x 308 cm, © Ai Weiwei, Courtesy the artist and neugerriemschneider, Berlin, Photo: Jens Ziehe, Berlin

Ai Weiwei (b. 1957) has been the subject of solo exhibitions at international museums and institutions including Design Museum, London (2023); Basilica di San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice (2022); Albertina Modern, Vienna (2022); Serralves Park, Porto (2021); Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis (2019); K20 and K21, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf (2019); Oca, São Paulo (2018); Sakıp Sabancı Museum, Istanbul (2017); Israel Museum, Jerusalem (2017); National Gallery Prague, Prague (2017); The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh (2016); National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2015); Royal Academy of Arts, London (2015); Alcatraz, San Francisco (2014); Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin (2014); Brooklyn Museum, New York (2014); Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2013); Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. (2012); German Pavilion, 55th Venice Biennale, Venice (2013); Tate Modern, London (2010); Haus der Kunst, Munich (2009); documenta 12, Kassel (2007) and Kunsthalle Bern, Bern (2004).

pawel althamer
das himmel

2 MAR until 6 APR
Opening – 01 MAR, 6-9 pm

Linienstrasse

Pawel Althamer, poster for das himmel, 2024

© Pawel Althamer. Courtesy the artist and neugerriemschneider, Berlin

In das himmel, Pawel Althamer’s seventh solo exhibition with neugerriemschneider, themes of love, healing and renewal manifest as a universal venue for reflection. Taking shape through a complex of sculptural forms divergent in scale, medium and approach, the presentation becomes an artist’s salon, its role tinged in the wake of its reconfiguration of access and purpose. Decidedly dense in its arrangement, das himmel possesses a material bulk that paradoxically serves as a blank canvas for artist and visitor alike – a sandbox for freely associative connections and projections. A hot tub installed in the gallery’s courtyard from March 2 – 16 acts as a counterpart to the exhibition’s interior component, expanding upon its communal spirit and serving as Althamer’s invitation to deepened internal reflection.

 

installation view: Pawel Althamer, das himmel, March 2 – April 6, 2024, neugerriemschneider, Berlin

© neugerriemschneider, Berlin. Courtesy the artist and neugerriemschneider. Photo: Jens Ziehe, Berlin

installation view: Pawel Althamer, das himmel, March 2 – April 6, 2024, neugerriemschneider, Berlin

© neugerriemschneider, Berlin. Courtesy the artist and neugerriemschneider. Photo: Jens Ziehe, Berlin

At the conceptual center of das himmel is a sculptural fireplace: a symbol of a home, those that inhabit it and its unique gravitational pull, by way of which physical warmth becomes interpersonal and emotional. Here, two angelic figures, their poses reminiscent of imagery of antiquity and the Renaissance, raise their arms to support a mantel of swirling forms that approximate clouds, smoke and waves. Contained between the pair is a constructed fire, its flames emanating from a dragon inspired by the figures of Pablo Picasso’s 1937 Guernica. The hearth as a locus of exchange radiates to its surroundings, extending outward to a rug-covered floor and an oversized, adapted, throne-like chair, rendering a wider public as participants in Althamer’s domestic. The sculptural continues to pervade das himmel in a vase depicting a couple in heartfelt embrace. Flowers fill the hollowed form in an intimation of life that mirrors the vitality suffusing its setting. A further ceramic portrait, split down its middle, becomes an ode not just to its subject, but to transformation and the happenstance nature of the artistic process. Seen together, the installation’s elements join to a cohesive whole, employing the gallery’s space as a frame that defines and contextualizes its staging.

installation view: Pawel Althamer, das himmel, March 2 – April 6, 2024, neugerriemschneider, Berlin

© neugerriemschneider, Berlin. Courtesy the artist and neugerriemschneider. Photo: Jens Ziehe, Berlin

installation view: Pawel Althamer, das himmel, March 2 – April 6, 2024, neugerriemschneider, Berlin

© neugerriemschneider, Berlin. Courtesy the artist and neugerriemschneider. Photo: Jens Ziehe,

Berlin

This environment of Althamer’s making is one that mines his past, attempts to make sense of his present and reaches toward his future in equal measure, taking as its focuses concepts as foundational as the artist’s notion of home, or his earliest pursuits of creating work for sustenance both spiritual and literal. das himmel’s title thus functions as an essential thesis for the exhibition itself – one that grammatically diverges from its German-language source (“der Himmel”), signaling a conscious departure from convention. His oeuvre, and particularly his frequent projects with residents of the disadvantaged Warsaw neighborhood of Bródno where he once lived and worked, feeds into his present here. His close physical connection to artistic legacies, use of generational histories, or his recurring use of doll houses as expanded portraiture mount, with the salon on view functioning as a prototype for elements of the home that he is now constructing, adjacent to his studio, on the outskirts of the city. In looking back, Althamer questions his future and that of his work, pondering how the trappings of life become an integral part of the self, and hold the capacity to nourish growth and fuel restoration, forming a site for metamorphosis and contemplation in an increasingly uncertain world.

 

Pawel Althamer (b. 1967) has been the subject of international solo exhibitions at museums and institutions including Magasin III, Stockholm (2024); Kunstforum Ostdeutsche Galerie, Regensburg (2022); Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz, Linz (2020); Helsinki Art Museum, Helsinki (2019); New Museum, New York (2014); Goetz Collection, Munich (2012); Museion, Bolzano (2012); Secession, Vienna (2009); Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, Milan (2007); and Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2006). He has also been included in the Kyiv Biennial (2023); Venice Biennale (2013); Gwangju Biennial (2010); Skulptur Projekte Münster (2007); Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art (2006); Istanbul Biennial (2005); and documenta (1997). Althamer lives and works in Warsaw.