Art hangs on the walls, the room is smoky and smells of beer, the bass of the music convulses through the excited voices of the crowd, making for a strange brew loaded with energy. Art is celebrated and exhibitions are put on for their own sake. Artists celebrate themselves and their work without the pretences of a commercial gallery. Everyone knows each other and everyone is in it together, exhibiting with each other regardless of levels of success or degrees of experience.

One can’t think of the Berlin art scene without thinking of the numerous off-spaces found in empty industrial barracks and storefronts that shape the city’s cultural landscape. Exhibitions and parties merge to give form to a new genre as it can only be found here: artists that run bars and bartenders that are artists. From the bouncer to the DJ, everyone is involved in the arts. Established artists and recent art school graduates are not too good to bring and hang their own works or curate their friends’ work into exhibitions in strange and obscure settings.

The art scene at large is celebrating a party that would be contrived and inhibited in an institutional setting. This is where the concept of the exhibition SEARCH & DESTROY enters the picture. One of the offspaces, Appartement, which recently closed so that the building can be renovated, will be rescued from obscurity and brought into the Galerie Mikael Andersen. From the bar to kitchen, everything has been reconstructed from the original. Even the structure of the walls has been transported via projection into the white cube of the gallery space. An off-space as a Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art) has been invited to exhibit.

Three curators (Amélie Grözinger, Philip Grözinger und Sebastiaan Schlicher) have invited 10 artists, who in turn each brought a further artist on board. The twenty-three artists will be the protagonists of this exhibition, showcasing the networks that constitute and define the Berlin art scene.

AMELIE GRÖZINGER

PHILIP GRÖZINGER

SEBASTIAAN SCHLICHER

DAVID CONROY - JESPER LIST THOMSEN

HANNES GRUBER - NURI KOERFER

MARKUS KRIEGER - KARTENRECHT

ADRIAN LOHMÜLLER - ELIZABETH MCTERNAN

VICTOR TIMOFEEV - BANG

MARC BIJL - ANDREAS SCHLAEGEL

MANFRED PECKL - MARCUS SENDLINGER

DESPINA STOKOU - JULIETTE BONNEVIOT

GREGOR HILDEBRANDT - ALICJA KWADE

IGOR PAASCH - UROS DJUROVIC