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Ben Kaufmann Closes Berlin Gallery, Plans Career in Football
The spring art season in Berlin lacks an important component: Galerie Ben Kaufmann. The gallery represented international artists Matthias Dornfeld, Bernd Ribbeck and Florian Morlat, among others. Reached by e-mail, the 39-year-old Kaufmann told A.i.A. that keeping up with the gallery's demands had become too daunting. "Nearly one year ago, I was in Mexico City for business reasons; after that I was installing a show in Paris and was due for an appointment in L.A. It was too much, I needed a change," he said. "Our time at the gallery was great, but I always knew that I would need to get out of the art business one day." The gallery closed at the end of December, following a presentation of the floor plans of its current and former locations.
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Performa Playbill: Jonathan Meese
For Performa 11, Berlin-based artist Jonathan Meese held his own one-man protest in his own solo show in Chelsea. Meese's timely "occupation" of the Bortolami gallery was a mad, sake-fuelled rant whose purpose was to shock his bourgeois art-world audience.
Meese's work often draws on history, particularly that of his own country, and his performances cathartically "act out" Germany's dark past. He can often appear as a messianic prophet. Pacing back and forth on a makeshift stage before a packed crowd, Meese spoke of government at odds with the individual. "Democracy wants you to be afraid of everything," he said. "It wants to make you un-precise. . . Democracy wants you to feel free but you are not free. You think you are so free because the jail is so big. The jail is so big you don't even see the guards . . . you yourself is [sic] the guard and the victim at the same time."
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Currently on view in the group show "Redux" at New York's Cristin Tierney Gallery (through Feb. 4) are two works by Joe Fig, both related to his 200
