Homeward bound today, but not until lunchtime. After fiddling with packing and trying to fit in all the paperwork I’ve collected, I had a late breakfast and finally paid the hotel bill at 09:15. Left my case at Reception to collect later.
Caught a bus to the Hauptbahnhof from the north entrance of Nordbahnhof and doubled back a little to the Museum für Gegenwart (Museum of Contemporary Art) at Hamburger Bahnhof; bought a €12.00 combi-ticket to visit the permanent and temporary exhibitions.
Not surprisingly the Museum has quite a large collection of Joseph Beuys (1921-1986), now regarded as one of the most influential German artists in the 2nd half of the 20th century. It also holds the private collection of the Berlin entrepreneur Erich Marx, which he offered to the city in the mid-1980s and which triggered the conversion of the old railway station to an art gallery with some pretty big spaces (parallels with Tate Modern in London). The Marx collection includes Beuys, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Anselm Kiefer, Cy Twombly, among others, and a selection from it is always on display.
I find Beuys 'difficult', but it was a pleasure to walk into a huge room of massive Warhols, dominated by one of his 14ft high Chairman Mao portraits. I also enjoyed the two comic-book Lichtensteins on display. There was a big feature on Cy Twombly's work, with one description commenting on his "generous sense of emptiness"; plus a display in a separate room of a dozen small 16th century engravings (I assume they were) by Poussin, Mignon and others in the Mannerist Fontainebleau School, which apparently had influenced him.
One enormous hall was filled with a large number of the almost-white paintings of Chinese artist Qiu Shihuaz; his first solo exhibition in a European gallery. "At first glance Qiu Shihua's works appear as monochrome, almost completely white canvases. However, on closer inspection, expansive landscapes emerge from their painterly surfaces, which, depending on the way you look at them, gradually blossom with detail, or recede again from view." It mostly didn't work for me, but some I liked.
The special exhibition space at the centre of Hamburger Bahnhof was completely blacked out, and held a collection of the light works of American artist Anthony McCall, under the title 'Five Minutes of Pure Sculpture'. The works "exist at the boundaries between cinema, sculpture and drawing: animated lines are projected in a dark room filled with a light haze, allowing viewers to step into the beam of light and change its appearance". It was all rather interesting, and naturally a challenge for a photographer – 2 sec exposures with a compact camera hand-held against the nearest wall.
Finally – with my eye on the clock – to Architektonika, a huge exhibition running down one side of the old station of sculptural and photographic works, films and paintings illustrating how artists have approached the interface between art and architecture. I made it almost to the end, without, to be honest, being terribly inspired, but had to leave at 13:00 to get back to the hotel to collect my suitcase and make the return journey to the Hauptbahnhof for the train to Schönefeld airport. In fact I'd stayed longer at Hamburger Bahnhof than expected and still hadn't seen everything.
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