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Matchbox – NIZA Collective

Work in Progress from 20. bis 29. November

Opening Saturday, 30th November at 7pm, Sunday, December 1st, open 2- 7pm

Oliver Zabel, Java, 15 x 7 x 2,5 cm, Mixed Media, 2023

In November, the NIZA collective will visit us and create a wall-sized work for “Matchbox” in the gallery within just one week. As in the group’s previous works, in which murals were realized in public spaces in Bremen, Polleur in Belgium, Schildow in Brandenburg, Bornholm and Berlin, a large mural will be painted based on a miniature template. It is therefore also possible to visit the artists at work, similar to what happens “outside” by chance. The small miniature that is the model for “Matchbox” was created by artist Oliver Zabel. Using old matchboxes, Zabel stages object collages whose playful scenes develop surprising changes of meaning in relation to their small, rare lithographs. The artists Daniela and Malte Nickau work together with Oliver on the NIZA concept, on large reproductions of the boxes, which also charmingly focuses on enlargements of small inaccuracies and creates a virtuoso painted blow-up of object art.

“Matchbox” also shows miniatures that have already been realized in public space as part of a series.

NIZA at work at the harbour Rønne/ Bornholm, 2024

Bad Art Secrets! -practice workshop-

Das Gute in der schlechten Kunst

The new workshop for artists and all those who don’t want to become one, the course offers instructions for bad art and overcoming inner blockages

It always seems to be about creating something true and beautiful. To find an expression for the times, to immerse the personal in the general, to balance technical perfection with expressiveness in order to then create something incomparable – to create a work of art. The work itself should be unique, enigmatic and yet ambiguous. Like a visual magnet that you want to look at again and again without ever being able to understand it or fully grasp its inherent mystery. This is true art, according to the recipes for great works of art taught by experienced artists.
But what if you put the cart before the horse from the other side and the actor could even be assigned to an unskilled, non-artistic community and approach the matter in a completely uninformed and direct way with the tools of the unconscious? Or he/she would be an artist with an irrepressible thirst for adventure for something new, untamed, for borderline experiences and play on the chaotic, expansive landscapes of the anarchic pastures of the accidental. “You have to throw off the learned, the academic, the so and so”. In order to gain true artistic freedom, it is immediately a matter of dumping this manicured, superfluous ballast, facing up to the psychological blockades, even escaping the home stretch of one’s own personality,” says Lydia Karstadt. “Great art is created in bad art,” says Lydia Karstadt, ”when it is simply open to what is being created.”

With artists such as Joseph Beuys, art has opened up to people with the expanded concept of art, so why shouldn’t people now also open up to art? So let’s allow all arbitrary, spontaneous, thoughtless, contradictory and reckless strategies in production to happen, as automatically as possible, and watch what happens.
For “Bad Art Secrets”, the first workshop for bad art, we have been able to exclusively win over the enthusiastic lecturer Lydia Karstadt. Once a week, she will give us an introduction to the random and thoughtless production of bad art and then help us with the subsequent direct production. With a humorous, light and performative effect, the course: Bad Art Secrets is particularly suitable for self-taught artists and those interested in breaking down mental inhibitions and gaining self-confidence and creative experience.

An exhibition presentation is planned after the course.

Participation fee per course is: 30,- Euro/ including material of 10€ Euro

Every Monday from 18:45 in the Crystal Ball gallery

Registration by e-mail: crystalballberlin@gmail.com

or 0151- 55 910 099

James Beatham – Radiant Springs

Installation/ Drawing

Vernissage, Saturday, September 7th. , 7pm

fridays from 3 to 7 pm, & after appointment, exhibition runs until Oktober, 18th.

Artist Talk on sunday, oktober, 6th at 4pm

James Beatham, Initial Sketch for an Ceramic Fountain, Berlin 2024

James Beatham’s artistic oeuvre encompasses drawing, ceramics, painting and objects. In multi-part installations, the artist combines all these expressions in one form and brings them into communication in diverse, imaginative arrangements. He creates model-like habitats or sets which, as miniaturized urban landscapes, reveal relations that are both meaningful and mysterious. They are constructed from mysterious objects, images, personal relics, poetic allusions and have a strong narrative quality. They in turn contain art, the impossible, the fictitious, perhaps literarily imagined, the future, which echoes in the interior as if in a reflection. Beatham’s means seem free and develop through their combination. Even the scales of the objects used are not uniform, so that the resulting worlds, surreally detached from everything, like space stations, simultaneously cite mythical and real places far removed from their known location. Some things seem to stand out of context like an incongruous souvenir, absurd but equally integrated, so that associations arise quite casually. Many of these small worlds have a fountain or even a fountain in common as the central object around which everything is arranged. The fountains are of different shapes and designs and can be seen as an image of the basic conditions of human settlements, dwellings and habitats. The artist also provides lighting and light. The rippling of the water, a natural sound, also acts as a logical argument. James Beatham thus creates places that seem alive. The presence of these works appears inviting. The artist dares to create a special simultaneity here. He allows the users of the water, the people and animals, to be absent. Through this void, he draws the viewer into his spaces and allows us to experience the landscape in our contemplation. In a similar way to model landscapes, we consider how we would live in it if it were adapted to our scale. At the same time, he throws us out through profanity and the use of the absurd – he places a manquette in our view and thus shows us the design-like, the unreal, the artificial, as the outside of things. In this challenge between inside and outside, these special compositions by the artist develop a dialectical sound that, animated by this extraordinary effect, can tell stories of creatures and people quite freely.
To accompany the installations, James Beatham is showing a series of new drawings and ceramic objects.

James Beatham drawing
James Beatham, option one, Drawing

Manfred Kirschner – Smoke Three Flames

exhibtion while summerbreak

Vernissage June, 23th, 8 pm, open after appointment: Tel: 0151 55910099

Manfred Kirschner, Smoke Three Flames, 140 x 120 cm, Acryl/ Papier auf Leinwand, 2024

Store & Crystal Ball Boutique for Sellerie Weekend

For the first time, Crystal Ball is presenting the boutique behind the exhibition space especially for Sellerie Weekend and is showing special prints, editions and art by Marion Bösen, Katharina Willand, Mimi-Mo, Lydia Karstadt, Gabriele Regiert and many other artists of the gallery.

The exhibition Store by M. Bösen and S.K. Willand and the boutique are open on Friday and Saturday from 2 to 7 pm.

We look forward to your visit!

Celery Shirt
Slipmats
Pret a Manger
Faltenwurf
Bread Silkscreenprint
I Shirts

Marion Bösen & Susanne Katharina Willand

Store

cover and shine through
Exhibition Opening on friday, 12.04.2024 at 7 pm

special opening times for Sellerie Weekend: Fr., 26.4 & Sa., 27.4., 15 bis 19 Uhr

Come and see the Crystal Ball Boutique for Sellerie Weekend

12.04.2024 – 10.05.2024

Susanne Katharina Willand
Marion Bösen

What is this about – is this a store, can you buy something here? Can you get information here? What’s actually going on with the window? The openings in the wall for light and fresh air, covered with curtains and blinds and curtains and curtains so that no one can see how we behave inside. Or sometimes we do. Then there’s a design intention or an aesthetic purpose or outdoor advertising. Or I stand behind the curtain and observe without being seen. The curtain is the membrane between my cell and the outside world, between the private and the public, the obvious and the hidden.

The artists Marion Bösen and Susanne Katharina Willand work with photography and with the strategies of their translations into other media. Marion Bösen often devotes her extensive printmaking oeuvre to phenomenological large sets and photographic series, which she transforms into series of screen prints or installative large surfaces. The artist collects images of objects in dysfunctional contexts, extraordinary situations in everyday urban life and everyday life and phenomena that may remain unexplained for the time being. The result is all kinds of collections, abandoned televisions, mattresses, dead birds and
rabbits, fruit and vegetables, spurned sandwiches. Or even the however failed or well-intentioned repair of stonework in the pavement of a pavement of a square in Sao Paulo. The rhythmic patterns and wallpaper patterns and wallpapers of vegetable crates, wigs, slices of bread or chicken eggs
– our entire multi-part world is revealed in Marion Boesen’s attentive attentive gaze. The isolated, simple object, the lifeless, lost animal body, but also the large sets that paint our everyday lives like modern still lifes, appear charged with an almost living presence.

Susanne Katharina Willand works in a similar field, she is interested in cloths, things,
stones, fields, mountains – landscape. In the artist’s current working method, the objects and scenes are translated into embroidery. She pays particular attention to the pattern, structure and spatiality of the shape. Thus the lines of the design of a commercially available drying towel, for example, are in its
state when the cloth is randomly thrown in its folds are Willands theme. In these distortions of the pattern, the artist uses the embroidery needle to evoke the actually absent three-dimensionality with the embroidery needle. She folds and arranges a tablecloth in such a way that a mountain landscape becomes tangible or she embroiders fine shadows into a cloth spread out flat in front of us so that it looks as if it has just been been crumpled up and was lying there unironed. The interest
in the oscillation of the difference between spatiality and surface is unmistakable, as is the
phenomenological collection, which she shares with Marion Bösen. In their joint exhibition at the Crystal Ball, the artists are showing an installation specially designed for the gallery, in which they work with
the shop window of the space.

Christine Schulz – Gedankenturm III

Opening Reception Sat. January 6th, 2024

Until february 9th., irregurlarly & by appointment
visible daily, from 7- 10 pm from outside

Christine Schulz – Gedankenturm III, Worpswede, 2022

The artist Christine Schulz has already created two installations under the title “Gedankenturm” (Tower of Thoughts), which very effectively combine images, objects and projections into a whole using the techniques of collage and consciously evoke associations. In Christine Schulz’s installations, the respective location always occupies an important position; the architecture is part of the work and gives space to the images and, above all, the light images. Light and illumination, the illuminated and object-like image in connection with its reflection, physically or in terms of content, are important design features of the artist’s work.

Movement is now added in Gedankenturm II and III. Despite the solid, profound materials used, Christine Schulz is not interested in conveying a single fixed message. On the contrary, through the fleeting and chronologically varying style of her buildings, she keeps the eye on connections and contexts of meaning that take us along as viewers in an open form. The poetic title: Tower of Thought already gives a hint. Can we pile up thoughts? Perhaps this is how it should be understood; the thoughts and ideas that we build on top of each other result in a construct of argumentation and chains of evidence, realities. A kind of ideal building that results from our perceptions. But is this not the danger of failure? Isn’t this precisely why we are threatened with the collapse of our constructions that we thought were safe? The artist Christine Schulz playfully makes this invisible structure visible to us in her installations by simultaneously relativizing it. She combines and assembles universals, objects, images and apparent trifles to create a living space. Originals and representatives of our world interact with each other through light, position, reflection and mirroring. She sets an airplane in motion, brings our sun, the star that sustains us, into the exhibition space and relates it to the projection of empty Coke bottles, a tinsel curtain in front of steel pipes and other objects. On the one hand, it is possible to enter this narrative landscape and its changing perspectives, to wander through it mentally. On the other hand, we can see the construction plan shining through in this suspension of opposites, i.e. the oscillation of our perception between poetics and a neutral view. In this way, we see both the world presented to us and the thoughts that create it. In the construction of reality, we discover a cycle, a complex network of relationships that can be both poetically and intellectually illuminating.

Piece Shop

8.12. – 31.12. 2023 open by appointment

Der Piece Shop und das saisonale, wechselnde Schaufenster dazu.

At first glance, the shop window of the Piece Shop looks like a romantic winter cliché. However, the artificial snow is made from shredded bank statements from the gallery and the works and offers on display subtly indicate that something is not quite right here or what it seems. An exhibition that only works at second glance. Lydia Karstadt and Gabriele Regiert have created two new screen print editions for the changing installation.

In the Piece Shop we are showing works by: Henrik Jacob, Miriam Jadischke, Vikenti Komitski, Andreas Kotulla, Sigrun Paulsen, Gabriele Regiert, Silky, Caren Sielaff and other artists.

It all began with the first “Prêt á Manger” edition, which Gabriele Regiert designed especially for the Crystal Ball in 2017. Still an absolute bestseller today. In the meantime, the crispbread
has to be ordered abroad. Around 80 small beads are then also worked into the low points of the bread slice. Signed on the back with the artist’s nail polish, they are framed in the exhibition space. The last examples of the serial unique pieces now cost 140 plus shipping.
Now, however, Lydia Karstadt & Gabriele Regiert have started a brand new series: There will be the official Prêt á Manger T Shirt ! (Price: 90,- €) After some refinements in the production technique, because we are now really approaching the Prê á porter with the sewing on of the beads, we are going into production from today. 🙂 Pre-orders possible! The edition is for the benefit of the exhibition space and the artist.

In addition to the new Pret â Mànger Edition, Lydia Karstadt offers the exceptional I- Shirt. Alongside the I Phone and I Pad, this is an indispensable, electronic-free accessory. The portrait of one of her eyes is transferred to her T-shirt.
The store is open on Fri. Dec. 8 and Sat. Dec. 9 from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. and afterwards by appointment.

Zugvögel Ensemble invites you to: ˈpælɪmpsest

Performance – free improvisation
Friday, 11/24/2023
ˈpælɪmpsest I: 7 p.m.
ˈpælɪmpsest II: 8 p.m

With ˈpælɪmpsest, the Zugvögel ensemble creates another world from the vibrations of their gut- and swarm intelligence after “Analogschatten” and “Träumen mit Bäumen”. Be a witness, be welcome.

On November 24, the Zugvoegel-Ensemble will land in the Crystal Ball with their new discursive performance “ˈpælɪmpsest”. They will be accompanied by discarded furs, whose immanent inscriptions will inevitably bring their own readings to the game.

On Friday 11/24/2023 there will be two free improvisations that will develop out of the moment.
Afterwards, the players will be happy to talk to the audience. Admission is half an hour before the start at 6.30 p.m.

Zentrale Verwaltung – Nobert Bauer & Ralf Tekaat

Opening Reception: Sat. 23rd of September, 7pm

Zentrale Verwaltung – performative Reading, Friday, 13. Okt., 9pm

until Sat. 11. November 2023

Zentrale Verwaltung – Norbert Bauer / Ralf Tekaat, Ausstellungsdetails, Herbstausstellung Kunstverein Hannover 2022

Administrations create an idealized, formalized version of other areas of social life.
social life. They express the processes there in numbers, ratios, procedures, or regulations, and at the same time have an effect on them. Administration and reality generate each other, but are not congruent.
The work Zentrale Verwaltung by the artists Norbert Bauer and Ralf Tekaat deals with institutions and forms of expression of an “administered world”: Authorities, forms, documents, service instructions, organization charts, administrative buildings, etc. are as familiar as they are incomprehensible as constitutive elements of social life. The artists attempt to express this ambivalent relationship in their collaboration with the means of drawing. The aim of the series is not to create clarity, but to get lost in corridors, service rooms, outbuildings, regulations, optimization strategies and responsibilities.
So far, the Central Administration series consists of 270 drawings in A4 format. Zentrale Verwaltung continues to grow and has so far been shown in exhibitions in Hamburg at the Nachtspeicher, in Bremen at the Güterbahnhof in the art associations of Speyer, Hannover and Fischerhude. This summer she has now been awarded the Heitland Foundation Prize. The multi-part work reflects and evokes, in addition to its free representational force virtuously, the sensitivities associated with bureaucratic and administrative processes. Emotions lurk in the rows of leaves; indeed, the central administration, with its conceptual, cooperative strategy, quite aptly bundles social as well as personal situations of the viewer. With just one, or even several Di A 4 drawings, the whole drama of a stressful tax settlement, the despair in the face of a nerve-racking ink-guzzling printer, or other existentially stressful stories can be told. But at the same time, because it is bold and free-associated, Central Administration relieves us and we can smile again and distinguish, because really existential, administration is not.

Crystal Ball Berlin