Berlin Museum Report

Museum für Fotografie

Helmut Newton: World without Men

Provocative, sexual and wild: ‘they call me the King of Kink’ said Helmut Newton. And he knew exactly how to let a woman’s body talk and inspire generations through the fashion language that he invented in his photographs.

His featured exhibition at the museum of Photography, World without Men, is a highlight, and is absolutely worth a visit (the show ends 13 October 2013)

Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart

Body Pressure

‘This is propaganda, you know, you know!’ sings the security lady loudly in the expansive hall of the Hamburger Bahnhof. Her dramatic operatic voice was still playing in my head as I wondered whether she was part of the Body Pressure exhibition of sculptures from the collection of the Nationalgalerie. To be honest, I was just as fascinated by the architecture of the converted Bahnhof itself, but the works are worth checking out too: sculptures from 1960 onwards by Georg Baselitz, Berlinde De Bruyckere, Duane Hanson, Wilhelm Lehmbruck, Paul McCarthy, Friederike Pezold, Marc Quinn, Thomas Schütte and Franz Erhard Walther.

A Pioneer of Abstraction

I was lucky enough to catch this exhibition by Hilma af Klint, one day before it finished. That woman was an innovative graphic artist. As the wall text stated: “according to her will, these works were not supposed to be made accessible to the public until 20 years after her death because she assumed that her contemporaries were not yet able to grasp their full meaning.”