For our Art Foundation trip we visited Berlin for 5 days.
After a long journey out starting at 2am on Monday we made it to Berlin around 10am where we looked at the Brandenburg gate and were left to our own accord. We headed over to the Jewish War Memorial, which is a very somber but amazing place, the ground undulates and you loose view of your surroundings as you’re obscured by these large towing blocks. Against the flat blue sky they look really beautiful and aesthetic, with people wondering around in awe inside.
The trip its self was very interesting for me as i have never visited Berlin, a city with such a huge and important past in European history. it has a really unique architecture with communist style buildings everywhere and then extremely modern glass buildings rising seemingly out of nowhere.
Berlin also has a huge amount of graffiti varying from scrappy tags to huge detailed murals over the size of multi-story buildings. as well as this there are posters plastered over everything adding a really amazing creative aesthetic to the city bringing bright bursts of colour and shape to a very geometric place.
We didn’t actually look at a great deal of ‘galleries’ so to speak but we did visit numerous museums and monuments. For me the highlight of the trip was the Barros collection, which is a private collection in a repurposed air raid shelter. The building itself is rife with history having been a air raid shelter designed by the nazis, a soviet prison and a techno nightclub to now a private gallery complete with a rooftop penthouse. Some of the artwork in there really appealed to me particularly work by Pamela Rosenkranz, Sergej Jensen and Michel Majerus. the works were large bold and unique and i will endeavour to research these artists and look at their work for my FMP.
We also went and looked at the Berlin National gallery and their exhibition on space was really interesting because it was exploring the concept of how people view art in a space. Curated by a painter working with sculptures it was a refreshing exhibition to go to as is was designed in an aesthetic manner with vast amounts of space and high round ceilings and great light which is not necessarily needed for sculptures.
I really enjoyed the trip and of course all the cheap beer! i would love to visit again with more time.
Harry Toller 