birdofpassage: 06.29.2012 Hamburger Bahnhof: Anthony McCall, Qiu Shihua, Morton Bartlett

Hamburger Bahnhof has a new exhibition in town called Five Minutes of Pure Sculpture. In reality it takes more than five minutes to experience the whole space but that's okay. I put off this visit in celebration of Jo's visit. She's an art/museum-aholic too so I said I'd wait until she gets here so we can check out the exhibition together. If we planned ahead we would also be going to the Jack White concert together, but that didn't pan out.. Nonetheless, I went earlier than her so I checked out the other exhibitions first.

Museum greeter. Hoi!

1. Getting ready , 2. Dan Flavin, 1976

Qiu Shihua paints in white. It's like a Chinese painting, shapes are ambiguous and landscapes appear and disappear in the fog, or was it a lake? You have to stare at the canvas for a while and then slowly the images unfold as your eyes think and focus.

pop art hipster

1. andy warhol, 2. Paint by numbers

Anselm Kiefer

offset lighting

The Secret Universe series of Morton Bartlett

Morton Bartlett makes dolls. Realistic dolls by hand and then takes pictures of them as if they were real models. It's kind of like that Japanese Blythe doll craze that happened in the early 2000s, but this was like, decades before Blythe, and five times the size of her. He would work fifty hours just on a facial expression on the head and studied the anatomy of these dolls for weeks on end to make them perfect.

hands and feet

1. Face, 2. Ears, 3. So real!

Enter the darkness

Anthony McCall tells you he will give you five minutes of pure sculpture, but that's a lie. When you step in behind the guarded wall there's nothing but black darkness and white light. The contrast is so stark (and with the use of a fog machine), he creates these moving ethereal curtains of light. A curtain is the closest word to describe it, because you really feel like you can touch it as it cascades to the floor...or is it like water? The experience is totally cool, and you can totally just sit or lie on the floor for hours on end without realising it.

Follow you into the dark

hypnosis

Patterns in the light, fingers intersecting the shadows

guess who

1. inside outside, 2. alongside

reflection

run run run (and don't get caught)

This is Architektonika 2. Do you remember, many months ago, I went to Architektonika 1? Anyway, some of the stuff here hasn't changed. The prevailing question is about how architecture defines urban space, the way we live and social structures.