The Berlinische Galerie champions Berlin-based artists it deems important – even when the reasons aren’t immediately obvious. What is clear is that in honouring Käthe Kruse, the curators have brought welcome attention to an important, if underground, artist.
Since the 1980s, she’s been careening through the wall-torn spaces of Kreuzberg, sharing rooms with Nan Goldin, and always performing, making or experimenting. As a member of the band Die Tödliche Doris, Kruse existed well outside Berlin’s art mainstream and much of her work is infused with a gleeful, naïve irreverence. Across from a large-scale projection of The Contract (2013) – revealing her nudity only when she turns the page – is rough, chaotic concert footage from the 90s.
They’re exhaustively experimental, and it’s only fair you sit through them all. The band’s instruments, treated like performative props, are shaken in their cases, or coated in horrible monochromatic beige leather – they’re set up on a perfect white stage, ready for performances.
Kruse gets bored quickly. As soon as she masters a medium – weaving, tufting, painting, tailoring – she moves on. Which is why you wish the curators had embraced more of that messy, genre-defiant energy instead of mirroring the glossy gestures of an institutional exhibition. Still, her unpretentious inventiveness bleeds through, and the exhibition is all the better for it.
- Berlinische Galerie, Alte Jakobstr. 124-128, Kreuzberg, Jetzt ist alles gut, through Jun 16, details.
