Alexander levy was absent from venice. While artists, collectors and museum people finally met again – at the opening of the Biennale in the Giardini and Arsenale – the Berlin gallery owner was still knocking plaster off bare walls. Because now the opening of his new gallery is to be celebrated here in the Moabit district. Some international visitors from Venice are also expected in the German capital for Gallery Weekend Berlin.
For the 18th time, a selected core of galleries, this year there are 52, are inviting to the art weekend in “Mitte, Schöneberg, Kreuzberg and Charlottenburg”. However, one looks in vain for Moabit in the announcement. If you look at the Gallery Weekend map, the Alexander Levy Gallery is only slightly offside. The main train station is five minutes away, Charlottenburg less than ten by subway.
Others dare to go even further, like the Ebensperger gallery with its rooms in the crematorium in Wedding, one of the most important art meeting points in the city not far from the Savvy, which self-confidently calls itself “The Laboratory of Form-Ideas” and is run by the designated director of the House of Cultures of the World, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung. And of course Mehdi Chouakri, in Berlin since 1996, who will open his 1000 square meters in the Wilhelmhallen in the north of Reinickendorf.
New locations: Gallery Weekend Berlin
In Moabit between Tiergarten, Charlottenburg and Wedding, Alexander Levy resides exactly on the border between “familiar and new”, as he says himself. But with the real estate prices, the gallery owners move on. In Kreuzberg, where he ran his gallery at Rudi-Dutschke-Strasse 26 for ten years, prices now start at 25 euros per square meter.
Levy took over the old rooms from Gregor Podnar in Moabit and expanded and renovated them considerably. Podnar is back in Vienna – and left a message: he has not found a single collector in the city. It’s what you’ve heard so often over the past ten years from gallerists who came with a lot of hope and gave up in frustration. Levy can’t understand that. But he also sees the danger Berlin is in. One hears too often from politicians that Berlin will become like Paris and London.
The small zoo begins in front of his gallery window, where the Georgian Selimkhan Changoschvili was shot in the street in 2019. A murder that is now blamed on Vladimir Putin. On the other side of the park is the Lageso, in front of which the refugees almost froze to death in the queues in 2015 because politics failed.
But settled Moabit begins with Levy’s gallery, which is already reminiscent of Charlottenburg; a few steps and you stroll along a spruced-up Spree bank. This is where some of his best customers live. But what role does “walk-in customers” actually play? Alexander Levy smiles. “None at all”, not even on Dutschke-Strasse. “Perhaps once during my time as a gallery owner I spontaneously sold a work.”
Lydia Ahrens and Alexander Levy run the gallery in Berlin
What: Gordon Welters
The rooms of the gallery are there to show the artists in exhibitions – selling takes place on a different communicative level. For ten years now, Levy has belonged to Rudi-Dutschke-Strasse, the line where many newcomers were stranded at the time, such as Michael Janssen and Rafael Jablonka from Cologne, where galleries such as Nordenhake and KOW can now be found around the corner. Levy also moved there at the time. He followed his father.
Alexander Levy comes from an art family. His father Thomas Levy has been an art dealer in Hamburg for more than 50 years; In 2019, however, he gave up his large gallery and now hosts living room-style salons. That’s how Alexander Levy grew up, with Eat-Art by Daniel Spoerri, a close family friend.
Art dealer family Levy
Thomas Levy’s biography is similar to so many of this generation: encounters with artists were often life-changing. Thomas Levy was active on the stock exchange at the age of 18 when he met Man Ray, Sonia Delaunay, Paul Celan and Meret Oppenheim in Paris. He is still in charge of Oppenheim’s estate today.
The son Alexander Levy actually wanted to do something different, to get into music, but also to continue what he liked about his father’s work: develop projects together with the artists, support them, advance them. He studied media management and learned everything a gallery owner needs: “business administration, finance, press and sales.” But the music business was much less flexible than art.
When the father had opened the rooms in Berlin and an employee withdrew – Alexander Levy grabbed it and from 2011 redesigned the program according to his ideas. It became his own gallery, which he now runs together with his girlfriend Lydia Ahrens. But now there will be a Réunion – the father will also move into the Moabite rooms. However, the father’s gallery has its own entrance. Nothing is mixed, not yet. But Alexander Levy is clear, the family gallery in the background also eases his business. The secondary market doesn’t interest him.
But how does it fit together, Meret Oppenheim, Man Ray, Daniel Spoerri and, let’s say, Julius von Bismarck? “Fur cup” and “Fulgurator”? Alexander Levy’s artist can best be described in terms of his best-known artist, whom he promoted and supported: the Berlin artist Julius von Bismarck.
His work is a mixture of highly political affinity for technology and insane inventiveness, hyper-perfectionist aesthetics and manic staging mania. No effort is spared when he films forest fires with a slow-motion camera or captures lightning.
The gallery earns its best money with Bismarck. And yet, in terms of content, the artist stands for some of the artists in the program because he needs large investments for every new project: technology costs money. There is also Nik Nowak, who wanders through the institutions with his incredibly precise sound installations – and shows how politically highly explosive topics can be aestheticized in a completely surprising way and made razor-sharp.
On the occasion of his exhibition on the loudspeaker war between East and West Berlin in the Berliner Kindl, Nowak said: “This is not conceptual art, but rather a physical work with the material.” A sentence that applies to many artists in the gallery.
But is there anything surreal about the art in the gallery? Surrealism is currently en vogue, including in the main exhibition at the Biennale, The Milk of Dreams. You can check that at Gallery Weekend Berlin, when Thomas and Alexander Levy show Meret Oppenheim, Man Ray and Egor Kraft (born in 1986 in Saint Petersburg).
For the Russian artist, who lives in Vienna himself but knows that his brother is on the Russian front and was only able to get his girlfriend out on the last flight to Austria, it was clear immediately after the start of the war that he would not be able to go through with the originally planned exhibition – and want.
For his exhibition “Lies, Half Truths & Propaganda (The Bad, the Worse and the Worst)”, Kraft, whose work also includes an intensive examination of the latest technologies, developed prototypes for forgery-proof photographs that are stored in a blog chain structure. With this program, Alexander Levy will certainly not be on the periphery for the Gallery Weekend, but will address the important and big questions of our time – and this art weekend.
Gallery Weekend Berlin, from April 29 to May 1, 2022 in 52 galleries in the city