Creepy creations post-crunch

Ana Finel Honigman

• Last Updated: February 22. 2009 8:30AM UAE / February 22. 2009 4:30AM GMT

Thanks to the recession, most of us are getting pretty accustomed to anxiety, confusion, and are re-evaluating our relationship with reality. Which is why the darkly comic surreality typified by David Lynch seems such a sensible form of fantasy to indulge in right now. Though the gritty sensibility of Berliners might mean that the economy presages less jarring changes for the locals, the city has seen a series of exhibitions purveying lavish doses of surrealism.

Thus, I Like Ponies, Iekeliene Stange’s delightfully dreamy show of Polaroids at Projekt Galerie – provides sweet escapism, while John Kleckner’s series of stunningly skilful drawings depicting decaying severed heads in The 40 Seasons at Peres Projects Berlin is a piquant reminder that taxes aren’t life’s only horrific inevitability.

At Stange’s first solo show in the Projekt Galerie’s storefront space, the Dutch photographer/ fashion model presented a Polaroid showing a boy collapsed over a squat, weathered woodshed in a lush green mountain scene. He looks lifeless, but the spirit of Stange’s work leaves no concerns about his condition. Death and unhappiness seem completely impossible in her lovely universe.

Another of her Polaroids features a pensive, pouting blond girl clutching a pipe in her hand and slumping under the weight of a pile of hats that is perched on her head. And in a third image among the many hung in clusters on the gallery’s redbrick walls, a pretty girl poses in a romper decorated with a Winnie-the-Pooh print and wearing a fluffy bunny mask, standing against a simplistic drawing of a face spray-painted onto a concrete wall.

The surrealism of Stange’s imagery is idyllic and inviting. Stange, who currently lives in London, captures much of the elegant idealism championed by the Pre-Raphaelites in their luscious and lovely youth. The underlying strength in Stange’s work is that there is no implication of impending doom. Instead, her works retain an alluring, lulling, childlike charm, making cynicism seem like an immature adolescent affectation.

The mood of Kleckner’s show, which runs until March 21, is a long way from such benevolence, although he executes his morbid vision with meticulous care and skill. In The 40 Seasons, the California-born and Berlin-based artist presents the product of working 14-hour days over the last three months, hunched over his tiny pieces of paper with a pen and watercolour brush. These small-scale works predominantly include powerfully engrossing scenes of corpses returning to nature. Though the themes are morbid, they are not hopeless. On the contrary, Kleckner’s vision demonstrates a vibrant view of man’s intimate relationship with nature. As Kleckner’s humans decompose, their bodies feed the plants, plump bugs and rich patches of colour which thrive around the bodies.

In contrast, by far the liveliest of the recent surrealist events in the city has been Lynchmob, which concluded yesterday. The show of more than 30 artists was organised by the expatriate impresarios of art cool Emilie Trice and Christopher David in. HBC Kollectiv, Berlin’s 1,800 square-metre former Hungarian cultural centre-turned-gallery.

Included in the pandemonium are exaggerated doctored photographs by Torsten Solin, Hannes Bend’s hard-candy hunter’s trophies and Sandro Porcu’s interactive sculpture, which consist of a jar with a cow’s heart that appears to beat when viewers sing into a microphone.

But as with Lynch’s work, the real punctum of Lynchmob lies in the pieces which combine real-life concerns with a heightened sense of creepiness. Among such works are Maxime Ballesteros’s photographs featuring his seductively feral friends wallowing in the high-gloss, but low-cost, romantic chaos of Wild at Heart, Sergio Roger’s homemade hunters trophies from fabric scraps, and David Nicholson’s massive Melancholia (Suellen) oil painting.

The ominous opulence of Nicholson’s luscious, larger than life-size portrait of his dog Hank and his then wife posing like Marie Antoinette (which is styled by David LaChapelle) is anchored by a pile of the couple’s bills stacked under a gaudy night-table and grounded by a big rock. “I felt like I was under that rock when I painted it,” the Canadian-born and Berlin-based artist explains. “So, when the bills kept coming and there was nothing I could do with them, I figured I would just put them in the painting. And I was most careful to render the logos of creditors I hated the most,” he says.

Revenge on reality or an artist’s personal stimulus package?