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Our Winter Exhibition features seven of the gallery's artists with a selection of works that has not previously been shown in Berlin.
In the front room Philippe Parreno's neon sign The Boy From Mars (2005) is on view. This yellow sign advertises a film of the same name by Parreno about an architectural construction called Hybrid Muscle, built in rural Thailand by the artist and the French architect Francois Roche, which functions as a battery house. Planet (2005) by Thomas Demand is a small new work depicting a planet in black & white. In diminutive scale (the image measures 30 x 30 cm) it conveys a sense of play between flatness and three-dimensionality, through the juxtaposition of the image's two-dimensional visual quality and its reference to the historical evolution of human thought about astronomy. Ugo Rondinone's windows entitled A SNOWLIKE STILL (2005) offer a view into the dark of the night, but the opaque, black perspex reveals nothing except a shadowy reflection of the viewer.
Pills are recurring objects in the late work of General Idea. Achrome (Manzoni) (1993-1995) consists of three oversized pills, wrapped in plaster bandage. The piece refers to Piero Manzoni's famous achrome-paintings, but is also part of General Idea's body of work on the theme of AIDS. Red & Turquoise (2005) by Ann Veronica Janssens is a sort of immaterial wall painting, consisting of coloured light. Two lamps with a dichroic filter (in the colours red and blue) are placed in such a way that they let through all the colours that would normally be blocked out by the filter. Light also plays a crucial role in Ceal Floyer's Auto Focus (2002); a slide projector without any slides. The machine constantly blends in and out of focus, trying to focus on an image (or slide) that is not there. The constant rhythm makes the white square appear almost to be breathing.
In the second space, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster's Atomic Park (Film Version) (2003-2004) is shown. In July 1945, the first atomic bomb detonated in the White Sands desert (New Mexico); a place that is now home to a recreation area as well as a military base for research. The beautiful images of the innocent sand and its visitors are burdened by the location's history.