Gallery Walk. The Strongest Exhibit Is a Shadow

The diagonal shadow of a window's glazing bars falls across a long white wall, and beside it hang plates that are half painted, half mirror. On Sunday, the last day of Berlin Art Week, three stops on the walk were among the more interesting of the day, and each deals with its room in its own way.

The first stop, on Lindenstraße on the way from Persons Projects to Soy Capitán, is a converted floor, not a purpose-built gallery. A load-bearing masonry pillar, painted white, stands in the middle of the room with its wiring exposed. Fluorescent tubes hang in rows beneath a ribbed ceiling, and on one wall an intercom with a handset and a small display sits at head height, with a double socket just above the floor. The floor is polished concrete with visible joints. A heavy steel staircase comes up from a lower level and ends in an opening in the floor, fenced with black upright bars. On the same floor as the pillar is a modern white double casement window above a fixed pane, with green trees behind it. On the lower level, a large mirror sculpture stands on a round mint-green plinth. The room has daylight, and the work uses it.

The curved, undulating plates stand off the wall on visible metal pins and cast shadows. One half of each is opaque, in dark violet or green, while the other is mirrored, with landscape-like streaks. In the mirrored halves you see the room and yourself, and because the plates stand off the wall, their shadows come into it too. So the strongest thing on the long white wall is the diagonal shadow of a window frame, which nobody made.

On a grey tabletop set on a wooden base, small objects are laid out on grey felt pads like samples: a cast glass tray in turquoise, opaque blocks brushed with violet paint, a flat, silvery mirrored dish with a swirling relief, yellow arcs in front of pink glass, and a small mirror panel, half painted like the big ones on the wall. The table reads like a sample book for the plates. A large hard-edge painting behind glass arranges large fields of orange-red, blue, grey, red-brown, yellow to ochre and turquoise, black bars forming an I-beam and an octagon of cloudy sky into something that looks like a painted floor plan, which suits a floor built for another purpose. A plywood box frame holds a pink-red column form alongside grey and white parts, as raw as the building.

The second stop, on Rudi-Dutschke-Straße, is the opposite: a large white hall with downstand beams, two columns and wide openings, a glossy dark grey poured floor and a long fluorescent strip along the edge of the ceiling. At least 11 small pictures in deep white box frames hang far apart, all at the same height. Two hold the eye. One is a tree in blossom on a green meadow, clear and almost cheerful. The other is a dark horizontal picture of rubble that turns the same restrained handling on something destroyed. The rest show a farmstead by a road, a coast, branches against strong blue, an interior with a figure against the light and a crouching figure wrapped entirely in a cloth in a bare landscape, and two narrow upright pictures hang side by side. The colours are muted, and the calm hang leaves a great deal of wall between the pictures. It is careful and a little too polite, because the deep frames and wide spacing protect the small pictures but also keep you at arm's length.

The third stop, on Leipziger Straße, takes colour right down to the floor. Large, freely contoured wall objects, more than 2.5 metres tall, are built up like a cut agate: concentric rings of magenta, pale blue, orange and ochre, with a crusty edge, moss green on the corner piece, black and dark blue or violet and pink on the other two. A broadly painted black line, flanked by mosaic-like fragments of colour, runs across them, drawing an animal-like creature with eyes picked out in yellow, and small drawings in clear acrylic boxes are mounted on top. One object is bent across a corner of the room, another has a face-like centre with eye sockets and teeth, and the floor is entirely covered by a marbled work in red, blue and pink that carries the colours of the wall downwards. Walk in and you are standing on a continuation of the wall pieces. It is the loudest of the three, and in front of the agate it is hard to tell whether the little drawings in their boxes are more than trimmings.

The first room gives the most, because there the works and the building are both after what light does to a surface. If a window's shadow can hold its own beside the plates there, that says a lot for how carefully they were hung.

Photographs: Florian Jäger, 13 September 2026.