Hannah Wallace

Neue Galleries in Berlin

The area around Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin is becoming a mini West Chelsea, with established galleries such as Konrad Fischer and Jablonka opening up outposts of their main galleries (in Düsseldorf and Cologne, respectively).  Read about it in my item for T: Style (Holiday 2007 issue).    

Damien Hirst in Dallas?

George Michael (yes, as in the I Want Your Sex George Michael) and his long-term boyfriend Kenny Goss have tweaked their gallery in Dallas into a foundation for contemporary British Art. I have to get down there to see the Hirst exhibit, which I've heard is extraordinary. Read all about it in my piece for last weekend's T: Style (the art issue).   

Contemporary Art in Naples

When we were in Naples, Italy last October, Michael supervised the installation of a Bruce Nauman retrospective at the new Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Donna Regina (MADRE). I spent many hours at this intimate yet expansive museum--it covers a lot of (recent) art historical ground in a small space. Like the Peggy Guggenheim in Venice or the Hallen für Neue Kunst in Schaffhausen, Switzerland, it's the kind of museum that can be done in an hour or less—but gets more interesting on your 2nd and 3rd visits.

My article on MADRE is in the August issue of Travel + Leisure.

And here's an extra tidbit (it was cut for space) about a 4th artwork in the collection that I found extremely moving:

Posthum Meiner Mutter (1999) by Hanne Darboven
Darboven, a German conceptual artist whose formally graphic works chronicle the passing of time, made this large-scale piece in the first year after her mother’s death. Twelve rows (representing those twelve months) each begin with a photograph of the artist, cigarette in hand, head cocked to one side, with her elderly mother, hands clasped modestly behind her back. The title of the work, the date of her mother’s death, and a series of numbers—a personal system for counting the passing of days and months—re-appear in the first column.
In each cell of the remaining 15 columns, she repeats this system and the word Heute (today), which she characteristically scratches out to denote finished days. Darboven successfully captures both the nonvisual phenomenon of time and the pathos of grief.