Punk art at the Grisebach auction house: hanging out with amused, unproductive parasites

When you start studying at an art school, imagination and reality often diverge greatly. Everything is more bureaucratic, your fellow students are usually better behaved and more ambitious, and the deadlines are more serious than you thought. When you studied at the Berlin UdK in 2017, there was a class that fulfilled everything that you had imagined an art university to be.

Actually, whenever something was provocative, interesting or at least hilarious and you asked where it came from, the answer was: Great Zipp. The punk concert? Class Zipp. The so-called popcorn brothers with their cars, films and campaigns? Class Zipp. Something to do with the police? Class Zipp. He and his students had just been camping in military tents in the courtyard of the Faculty of Fine Arts.

When they were dismantled, they moved into the exhibition room of the Grisebach auction house, an incarnated symbol of a milieu of the Berlin art scene, which, with thin cotton scarves, signet rings, white bras under white blouses, pearl earrings and stock portfolios, could not be further removed from the punks and underdogs, the self-tattooed, shaved-headed and colorfully blonde persuaders of the class Zipp.

Was it the ultimate coup? But for whom? The class or the art trade? In the end it didn't matter. At some point they moved out again and pursued their adventures in college, and the auction house began regularly showing other art school classes.

When Thomas Zipp, not only a committed professor but of course also a successful artist, died suddenly and far too young this spring, the pain was also great for students and alumni. It was his artistic colleague Tania Elstermeyer who approached the auction house. The result was a show as a tribute to the mentor. “I am in the feedback loop – The Thomas Zipp Class” is the name of the group exhibition, which this time can be viewed in the basement of the Villa Grisebach on Fasanenstrasse in Charlottenburg.

Right in the foyer, a work by the professor himself greets you: “Big Mouse” from 2025. The buoy-like wobbling sculpture with Mickey Mouse head and flapping arms laughs from above into the faces of visitors, above which a headless octopus – “Créature Tentaculaire” by Nolundi Tschudi – lounges on the balustrade. Limp, reddish limbs hang unmotivated on the banister: For “Hide,” Iza Regel put polystyrene into red tights. As soon as you enter the exhibition it is clear: the amused, unproductive parasites are (back) there. And how.

In front of the fireplace, an alien shrimp-like creature crouches in its naked creatureliness; Mary-Audrey Ramirez has laid it there; with its shiny vinyl skin, “Jen (wingless)” arouses pity and repulsion in equal measure. Next to it is a crucifix: Kurt von Bley made it out of crutches and prostheses, hung with all sorts of medical equipment. “Pars pro toto,” as it is titled, looks as if its individual parts had been used to amputate the wings of the crumpled animal. But without anesthesia.

“I am in the feedback – The Thomas Zipp class”, Grisebach, Berlin, until October 8th.

More than 70 works are gathered here, including great paintings, such as the highly amusing “Circus Habitus” by Maja Herniks, in which a human poodle has to jump through the hoop of a sad clown in Adidas pants. Or the workers of Ferdinand Döllberg, who work for the sake of work, whose solo exhibitions in his Anton Janizewski gallery are always sold out. But video art (Shiri Faingold), ceramics (Sophia Lietsche), drawing (Andi Fischer) and photography (Greta Wildhage) are also represented.

This media diversity is perhaps what is most surprising here. This and the list of names, some of which are now quite well known, that emerged from Zipp's class. Obviously, as a professor, the artist always tried to promote the students' style and not to impose his own. And yet there are things that unite. The desire for provocation, the enjoyment of dirt and the self-confidence for your own thing. And that just lives “in the feedback”.