Group show painting in Berlin: Re-secularizing the de-secularized world

If you press your nose against the window pane of the illuminated Weserhalle gallery in Berlin in the dim autumn darkness, it is the picture on the wall to the left that sticks in your mind. The British painter Martyn Cross has painted a landscape on it, blurred shapes glow in butter yellow and powder blue, which the brain immediately translates into a gnarled tree, a blazing fire with smoky clouds and the entrance to a cave. Or are the curved spots just the initials of his name, MAC? Then the rest would burst into flames.

When you return the next day at opening time, you can see the sand that Cross rubs into the primer of the canvas, causing the colors to run together. And also the nails, which look like they were hand-forged, with which he hewn the folded canvas into the frame. In general, the edges of the works on display catch your eye. For example, those of Lisa Ivory's delicate formats, whose colors and imagery evoke the melancholy of Romanticism, but whose titanium white and cleanly brushed side edges suddenly and artificially pull you into the present, thus emphasizing the breaks between the object and the imagery.

“The Unworlding” is the name of the group show, a collaboration between the Weserhalle and mepaintsme, a US virtual platform for contemporary art. Ironically, the theme materializes here: the works that would otherwise be presented digitally regain their very physical presence. Despite the airy hanging, thanks to the small formats, a surprising number of works fit into the narrow space and unfold a whole bouquet of eponymous interpretations.

Joseba Eskubi evokes heartbreaking associations with climate change and (environmental) destruction of the world when his oily polar bear seems to lose its spirit on dystopian rocks, while Joseph Dilnot smears mossy, extinct landscapes into the picture with a poisonous pulsation, or Gosia Machon lets her human creatures, created from ink, grieve, ponder and marvel over and under unclear things.

But not everything human remains blurred. In ultraviolet contrast, Lucas Kaiser's illustrative-artificial protagonists resist spiritualization, loss of function and ruin with optimistic smiles and serious effort. The not-so-small works could be seen as the last fun, productive attempt to secularize the world here again. Actually a bit like the whole exhibition.

The Unworlding: MEPAINTSME × WESERHALLE, Weserhalle Berlin, until October 24th Hilka Dirks