Alicja Kwade, Ferdinand Hodler & Igor Vidor Time of the autumn equinox in the Berlinische Galerie

The transition to the question of how a person and his physical presence in space can be described fits very coherently into this time and atmosphere and is the focus of Alicja Kwade's current exhibition "In Abwesenheit" at the Berlinische Galerie. What is exciting and close or unapproachable - as always, this is up to the viewer's perception - is that the works on display revolve around Kwade herself, indeed can be seen as self-portraits. Particularly captivating: her massive, green-bronze shimmering curved DNA structures and the sculpture installation "Clout-Count" which is reminiscent of an exposed heart whose veins pour down through the room in the form of cables from the ceiling, the supposed profanity of the material communicating openness, ordered chaos and vulnerability.

Context is important when it comes to the work of Brazilian artist Igor Vidor, whose three video works are on view at the Berlinische Galerie's IBB Video Room until October 4. His latest work "A Praga (The Plague)" is particularly relevant and oppressive. At first glance, there is no reference or connection whatsoever to a heavily armed police operation in a favela in Rio de Janeiro and footage from Oberndorf am Neckar in Baden-Württemberg, which the artist took himself during a visit.

Few people know that Oberndorf is the headquarters of the arms company Heckler & Koch and is thus directly and fatally connected to the suffering that these weapons systematically cause day after day, especially in marginalized groups of the population. The small town and its local arms industry has been exporting violence abroad through German weapons for over a hundred years.

Vidor analyzes the influence and responsibility of the United States as well as European countries in the spread of violence in Brazil and Latin America through the production and trade of these weapons. The film is also available virtually!

We end our visit with the exhibition of the Swiss painter Ferdinand Hodler, whose portraits, landscapes and figure paintings are rightly counted among the icons of modernism and have brought him posthumous, uninterrupted international recognition to this day. The beginning of his path actually lay in Berlin, as he exhibited here virtually every year from 1898 until the start of World War I.

"The exhibition 'Ferdinand Hodler and Berlin Modernism' features some 50 paintings by the artist. Contemporaries saw in Hodler above all the 'human actor who knows how to shape the soul through the body,' according to the artist Paul Klee in 1911. Hodler's art focused on simplification and grandeur. The timelessly elegant postures and delicate faces of his dancers and young men are captivating to this day. They appear archaic, often serious and yet also soulful, full of lightness and life. Hodler drew for his art from nature, of which he understood man to be a part. The air that breathes his figures and blows around his mountains is cold and clear. The artist, Hodler himself wrote in one of his texts, "shows us a magnified, a simplified nature, freed from all details."

With this quote and in thoughts of Alicja Kwade's freestanding DNA sculptures, our exhibition circle in the Berlinische Galerie closes and we strive out into the swirl and early autumn gray of Berlin.

Translated by Alexander Brandes