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In principle, any abstraction of the object is allowed which has a sufficiently strong creative power behind it.

Max Beckmann

“Wunderlust” is a group exhibition curated by Laurie De Chiara of Berlin-based artists that was originally shown in Los Angeles and now has returned to Berlin to take on a new context.  All of the exhibiting artists come from different backgrounds, cultures and represent varied artistic approaches.  Beyond their shared commonality of where the work was produced, the exhibition presents a range of styles, references, thought processes and outcomes.  Wunderlust, translates to mean “magical desire”, which calls for much interpretation through the eyes of the creator and the viewer.  Thus the idea of the exhibition is to allow for all possibilities of what one actually sees or wants to see.

The artworks presented in Wunderlust encourage interpretation by not providing answers but perhaps more questions.  There are layers of mystery some more abstract then others but all provoking discourse.  In the “Rainbow Paintbrush Series” of Warren Neidich each paintbrush is a product of an evolving condition of brain/mind first projected and then enacted in the original  landscape painting, for instance the bow in Peter Paul Rubens, Landscape with Rainbow, 1636, and then reconstituted through the process of what he refers to as a Performative Pull as an afterimage on the bristles of the animal hair brushes he then hangs as stand ins.  Wolfgang Karl May presents graphite drawings representing a “tree house of dreams” and the plans of travel to various locations around the world, each time giving the tree house a new life.  Franz Hoefner and Harry Sachs’s the artistic duo create ironic sculptural installations that respond to specific sites or situations with a critical social and cultural awareness.  There is a video with a selection of their documented projects.

One of the central themes in Cornelia Schmidt-Bleek’s sumi ink drawings of botanical imagery  explore the relationship between society, culture and nature.  In Peter Freitag’s, photo-collage series “Private Stages” posed nudes have been altered redirecting the viewers’ attention to the background, creating an ambiguity to the situation.  David Krippendorff’s obscured photograph, “Darkness Shades Me”, gives a sublime presence to this almost absent bouquet of flowers.   The “Utopian Fair” sculpture of Stefan Saffer has a formalist construction but is then abstracted in a playful and improvisational approach that allows for further discourse and interpretation.  Architectural structures are abstracted in Eva-Maria Wilde’s offset print collages with layered fields of color and tape to construct a completely new formation.  Maureen Jeram captures the feeling of a laid back Berlin summer life in her realistic oil painted collages yet there is a sense of mystery remaining.

Albrecht Schaefer photographs capture a moment of time using minimal means to play with light and shadow transforming and abstracting and everyday setting in Berlin.  Matthew Burbridge’s ironic works are commentaries on recent art forms such as “pseudo- formalism” which opens up a platform for contemporary art practice discourse.  Elena Bajo is a “social sculptor” taking her starting point from existing objects or paintings, deconstructing them and then recontextualizing their form in an installation dealing with the subtle relationships.