barbie does the hamburger bahnhof

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why hello, my pretties...

back from another field trip - this time to the hamburger bahnoff: museum für gegenwart (lit: the museum for the present - or, the museum of contemporary art).

this incredible museum (which used to be a train station connecting berlin and hamburg) houses an incredible collection, including work by Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, Anselm Kiefer, Joseph Beuys, and a stunning warhol collection immaculately displayed for ultimate visceral impact.

the building itself is quite epic - here it is from the outside:



but also, from the very outset it has a sense of humour:



when you enter you really do feel the full force of the space:



but the spaces are so clean and clear and focused that the building itself seamlessly passes from foreground to background, which, of course, prevents overstimulation and superficial glossing over work that one otherwise would have liked to meditate on.

for example, take this exhibit:



this is a piece by anselm kiefer:



close-up of one of his "books":



this piece by richard long (pictured here in the foreground) was really quite stunning - composed wholy of slabs of raw marble:



another view:



from here we moved into the warhol room:



the warhols are all owned by a man named erich marx who somehow had the foresight to buy them in the 60s, earning his current reputation of being a true collector-visionary, as at the time he would have no idea that he would ever be able to display the work...

goodness knows where he stored the camouflage painting before it was hung in the bahnhof - but i suppose that at the time, berlin had no shortage of large empty spaces...

coming out of the warhol room you enter this reading room:





ah, germany - the land of exquisite typography (sigh).

and then you can go upstairs and see a most unusual exhibition of staged photographs by anna and harold blume, of whom i had never heard prior to this visit (apparently, this is part of the bahnhof's mandate of "bringing to light relatively unexposed works in the state collections of 20th and 21st-century art, and making them accessible to a wide audience").

these photographs are thoroughly disquieting yet also quite humorous - an unusual but refreshing combination that reminds me a little of david lynch (esp. the 'mahlzeit' photo, below). their thesis, apparently is:

Before going out into the big, wide, world, one ought to thoroughly investigate “home sweet home” to see whether every conceivable form of misery is not present there already.

according to the bahnhof's offical site,

"this artistic couple stages temporal sequences within which they themselves act as protagonists. The scenes are often reduced, estranged, and above all odd: order and chaos seem to mutually condition one another, role–playing and convention inhere in each object, conditioning modes of behavior and provoking resistance. With their diagnoses of the contemporary condition, the works of Anna and Bernhard Blume always interweave performance, painting, and photography. Deformation and metaphor, subjective perception and collective conventions are thematized, thereby touching on the question of whether the boundaries of the visible also determine those of experience."

here are some examples of the work entitled "reine vernunft" (pure reason):







and these, from "kitchen frenzy":



i LOVE these plates - and they're actually going into production:











then there are these nutty photographs:







and finally this, which i found the most unsettling of them all:



and then you come back out into the main room:





beautiful, huh?

anyway, there you have it - a virtual tour of the hamburger bahnhof.

i will be back soon with a post about food, i think. until then, enjoy and be in touch :)

xo,
abstract contemporary barbie