Galerie Sherin Najjar Opens in Potsdamer Platz with Group Exhibition

BERLIN.- The new gallery space Galerie Sherin Najjar has opened its doors at the Potsdamer Platz. The focus of the gallery program lies on young and established artists working on the interface between language and image. With this emphasis it is the goal of the gallery to win its own profile and to develop a thematically aligned platform of this dedicated form of contemporary art.

Galerie Sherin Najjar presents their first show A Man is not a Tree. This group exhibition aims to show the ongoing impact of language within contemporary art. It examines the relationship between linguistic expression and cultural identity. Alongside Michael Joaquin Grey, Gonkar Gyatso and Anna Malagrida the young artist Mark Melvin is part of the exhibition.

Installtion view. Photo: Courtesy Galerie Sherin Najjar

For New York based artist and inventor Michael Joaquin Grey (*1961) evolutional processes and human networks are specific inspirations. Featuring his wall vinyl Relational Evolution, his generative computational drawing Northern Romantic Citrus and his early sculpture Ceramic Sentence (dual body: rearranging orange and red coelom) Grey examines the development and the underlying principles of life and language. Repetition and self-organization – as they appear in Michael Joaquin Grey’s work – evoke morphology and ongoing transformation and are also important elements in the most recent work Changes by British artist Mark Melvin (*1979). Melvin usually works with neon tubes and lightboxes. He often experiments with various cycles and levels of repetition using footage of musical and film, lyrics and existing texts, whereby his use of language often exposes hidden meanings.

Exil Tibetan Gonkar Gyatso (*1961) proposes insightful statements on cultural hybridity of globalization. In his work on paper Shambala of the Modern Times he integrates letters and stickers as found objects of mass media culture within the shape of Buddhist iconography. The photographs of Spanish artist Anna Malagrida (*1970) deal with language as memory. In her untitled works from the Series Point de Vue the artist has methodically photographed every window in the common rooms of a spa that she visited as a child, at a moment prior to its imminent demolition. The windows are partially covered with thick strokes of whiting. On these passers-by have left their traces as barely readable messages while the white veil of colour hinders the view of the sea.

Michael Joaquin Grey showed with Gladstone, Lisson and bitforms Gallery New York and his work was recently seen in a solo show at the MoMA/PS1 curated by Klaus Biesenbach and at the Sundance Filmfestival in Utah. Mark Melvin is currently on show with the exhibition White Garden in Lisbon and Anna Malagrida was recently invited to present a retrospective of her photographs at the Fundacion Mapfre Madrid. Gonkar Gyatso’s work Shambala of the Modern Times was selected by Daniel Birnbaum for the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009.