The acclaimed film and video artist Omer Fast is getting a major solo exhibit at Berlin's Martin Gropius Bau. In "Talking is not always the solution," The Israeli-born, Berlin-based artist will unveil his latest work, "August 2016," a 3D film inspired by the life of August Sander, in addition to six other video explorations into the slippery boundaries between fact and fiction, history and memory and the mediating or oppressive role of the media.
The Museum Berggruen opens a large-scale exhibition devoted to George Condo. "Confrontation" shows the American artist's work from the 1980s onwards alongside works by Cézanne, Picasso, Matisse, Klee and Giacometti culled from the Berlin Nationalgalerie's collection, to open up new perspectives and ways of engaging with the mix of irony and veneration that Condo brings to his understanding of art history, which coexists with a pop cultural sensibility laced with humor and grotesquery.
Berlin's Kupferstichkabinett, which holds over half of Hieronymus Bosch's surviving drawings, will display its entire collection of Bosch drawings for the first time in fifteen years, to mark the 500th anniversary of the Netherlandish master's death. The studio exhibit "Hieronymus Bosch and His Pictorial World in the 16th and 17th century" also features select paintings by Bosch as well as copies and Bosch-inspired from the likes of Brouwer, Pieter Breugel, Teniers and even James Ensor. The centrepiece of the exhibition is the oak panel painting St. John on Patmos, one of Bosch's major works, signed by the artist. Also on display are four copies based on Bosch's greatest paintings, including the monumental Last Judgement, by Lucas Cranach the Elder. (until Feb 19)
The German Historical Museum has just unveiled an exhibit that tells the often-neglected history of Germany as a major European colonial power in the 19th and early 20th centuries. GERMAN COLONIALISM FRAGMENTS PAST AND PRESENT focuses both on the colonizers and the colonized. In 500 objects, the exhibit examine the motives, methods and consequences of this under examined chapter in modern European history, while discussing the effect of the memory of the colonial past on present-day Germany.
Lastly, Hitler's bunker has been controversially recreated in an underground air raid shelter a little more than a mile from the original site of the long-demolished Führerbunker. The private exhibit, which has drawn criticism from the nearby Topography of Terror and others, contains a detailed walk-in recreation of the study where Hitler and his wife Eva Braun took their lives, as well as a scale model of the entire bunker complex - bizarrely supplemented by color photos from the German film "Downfall."