Some may find this exhibition hard to stomach (the person I was with couldn’t hack it), but take a deep breath and plunge into the anarchic, madcap lunacy of Ms Davis. The LA-born artist, now a long-term Berlin resident, has done it all: sculptures, installations, videos, even set up her own gallery. She’s an artwork in herself: an unfiltered, unfettered creation.
Frilly then strident, intelligent yet naive, powerful and fragile – playful without ever being trite. It is such a potent presence you can almost feel her coaxing you through the gallery rooms. One of the focal points of the show is the video work, ‘The White to Be Angry’ (1999) – an uncomfortable and, at times, lurid grimace through far-right attitudes, homosexuality and sex.
But for all her punk spikiness, the exhibition will suddenly give way to moments of aching vulnerability: “I’ll lure you to my Adriatic cave and cook you pasta,” she writes on one of her Wicked Pavilion Portraits, the hand-written text barely discernible beneath the smeared portrait. The final room will forever implant itself in your brain – you won’t know what to make of it, and that’s fine.
- Vaginal Davis: Fablehaftes Produkt, Gropius Bau, Niederkirchnerstr. 7, Mitte. Through Sep 14, details.
