Crystal Ball Berlin – Gegenwartskunst und Performance

Elke Graalfs – Good News

30 Schichten Unlust zur Erbauung

Vernissage, December 7th, at 7 pm

until January, 12th, 2025

open; fridays 2 to 7pm & after appointment

Elke Graalfs, 30 Schichten Unlust zur Erbauung, 2024, Photos by Jutta Lilienfein

In her exhibition at the Crystal Ball, Elke Graalfs is showing an installative project idea that has developed from her work form and which she has long wanted to realize in the exhibition space. The artist’s works move and combine photography and painting in collages and expansive installations.

For “Good News – 30 Schichten Unlust zur Erbauung”, Graalfs has developed an installation that is similar to her studio situation, focusing on the processual nature of her working strategy and the secondary paths that accompany it. The artist lines the walls of her studio with white paper, as she very often paints her motifs on paper in order to cut them out later and use them for installations. This is very similar to her collage work, which she also continues on the pages of printed books and magazines. In the studio, however, painting is always accompanied by commenting on and implementing other ideas in the margins or on the sides of the large pieces of paper as she works. If motifs are later cut out and new papers are stapled over them, layers also open up in the room, like in a book. Formulated thoughts, political commentaries and drawings emerge like an inner dialog that also packs drafts, incidentals and relations of concepts into speech bubbles and images on the sheets of paper. We see the creative process with its accompanying inner actions, mirroring the artist’s thoughts and feelings. In the exhibition, the artist will show this experiment, creating an almost holistic, structuralist concept in which not only the finished work, but also the path to it, with its difficulties, distractions, side paths and pauses, is of interest. Yes, the pause itself, the not doing, not painting or doing something else that nevertheless leads to the work, can become the subject of a playful investigation. But it can also open up a personal, sensitive context. In Graalf’s installation, she shows the work as if in a book, thus opening up her works to further relationships that surround the artwork like speaking layers and locate it in a sphere of creation, as if it had only just been completed the moment we look at it. This can be found as a recurring motif in Elke Graalf’s works, that she transforms creative, mental processes into spatial adaptations and thus into installations that are as suitable as they are impressive.

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!

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

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

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.