BEL ÉTAGE. Three Days in a Commercial Courtyard

Sunday 13 September 2026, the last day of Berlin Art Week and the last chance for this exhibition: "BEL ÉTAGE" was open for three days, 11 to 13 September, noon to 6 pm, having opened on 10 September at 6 pm. The poster at the entrance names three galleries — Anja Knoess, Leuenroth and Evelyn Drewes — and works by Jan Dörre, Tom Freitag, Lennart Grau, Beate Höing, Lara Kaiser, Helena Parada Kim, Achim Riethmann, Kinki Texas and Susanne Wurlitzer, plus a contribution under the title LAB with further participants.

The venue is called BACKSPACE and is not a gallery but an event space in a commercial yard: a concrete underpass, a sawtooth-roofed hall, yellow-and-black impact markings on the corner, air conditioning units on the facade opposite, a light box with the name above the entrance. Inside, a hall with white trusses, exposed pipework, two grey air heaters below the roof and ceiling light strips. A temporary exhibition that does not pretend otherwise.

In the corridor, beneath a continuous window band with steel glazing bars, six works hang in a row. Five of them are monochrome relief paintings in mauve, grey-green and grey-brown, the paint applied in thick loops and ridges, the formats rising from about fifty centimetres to a good metre and a half. Between them a figurative painting in pink, cream and blue with soft gradients. The same movement once as a picture and five times as pure trace.

In the hall stand white plinths and a low platform with ceramics: towers of painted porcelain vases set on top of one another, up to two and a half metres high, populated by cockerels, owl heads with wings, hands and blossom bowls, glazed high-gloss in white-blue, green, pink, yellow and gold. The vessels look found and newly assembled; the structure looks precarious. On the surrounding walls small-format painting, prints and works on paper in neon green, pink and blue, along with one large, densely populated picture with figures, traces of writing and boat motifs.

In one cabinet stand five identical tall plinths. On each lies an object with a core of raw concrete or stone combined with fanned, mirrored chrome fins that sit against it like wreaths or visors. The material is hard and dull, the fins pull the whole room into the object. On the wall beside them a triptych of framed sepia photographs, arms raised, and an airy row of small watercolours with figures on stilts.

And then the works that talk. A text painting in neon pink on a gridded ground whose sentence claims, in substance, that ultimate horror paralyses memory in a merciful way. A hand-lettered canvas with the parting line "SEE YOU LATER, CURATOR". And a small canvas with a reproduced woodcut — a fool with a belled cap, a transverse flute and a drum — covered with yellow and blue spatters and the line "ATTENTION SPAM". The exhibition business comments on itself here, in a commercial yard, for three days, and then packs up again.

There are labels, but they are not legible in my photographs. Which of the nine names belongs to which work is therefore not in this text.

Photographs: Florian Jäger, 13 September 2026.