Dhe word “pedestrian zone” does not conjure up images of art. Except maybe Chagall posters by Nanu-Nana, or those ugly graffiti-covered metal obstacles made by local artists who once drank white wine with the borough mayor. The only pedestrian zone in Berlin is in the Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf district. It is no exception to the typical German urban depression with cheap shops and mobile phone shops. And yet, just around the corner from McDonald’s, here is a gallery. Her name is Stallman.
As unpretentious as it is ambitious, the young gallery mainly presents artists who are not yet known. A group show with painting, photography, sculpture and design is currently on view there under the title “Do you live here?”. It looks like a busy, extremely avant-garde apartment. The exhibition shows where the journey of the wide-awake gallery owner Lina Stallmann and her partner, the painter Daniel Spivakov, could soon lead: namely upwards.
Two years ago – in the midst of the deepest pandemic lethargy, in which galleries clung to Corona aid and did not know whether the art world would shift completely to the virtual – the couple spontaneously opened the two rooms facing the street for exhibitions and moved to live in the Room to the backyard. Spivakov, who was born in Kyiv in 1996 and studied at London’s Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, paints out there down to the freezing point. Lina Stallmann, born in 1994, studied business administration in Munich and innovation management in London and worked in the powerful Lévy Gorvy gallery until they cut staff there because of Covid.
She decided to open her own gallery in London on the spur of the moment – but then an acquaintance let them use the Berlin space, and within two weeks the capital had a new art venue that is so bluntly cheerful and ambitious that the idea of the apartment exhibitions, how to she knows from Berlin in the 90s, was catapulted into the Instagram age.
The Stallmann Gallery does not have an exclusive list of artists, they want to gain a foothold first. But she supports the artists through purchases and sales, says the gallery owner. The exhibition, which was bursting at the seams at the opening, shows that this is successful. Very young artists on the threshold of studying were brought together with internationally known names from the architectural context for the opening.
These include AAS Gonzalez Haase and Sam Chermayeff, whose minimalist steel furniture – a bed made ready for sleep, a table with openings for plants, or a long hook with a bunch of bananas dangling – has something of slightly disorganized-looking roommates who, after a long irritated blinking into the light.
There are also stones by Pia Matthes that you can plug into an outlet and warm up on. Daniel Spivakov is also one of the artists on display. He copied a heroic image by Georg Baselitz and provided the zombie-like figure with a bright blue anorak.
Pia Matthes, “Thermonites”, 2020
Quelle: Courtesy Stallmann
A talented communicator, Spivakov is friends with American artist Julian Schnabel, who let the couple live in his Palazzo Chupi in Manhattan. And he included it in the exhibition “Chronorama. Photographic Treasures of the 20th Century”, which will be shown at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice from March 12, 2023 and combines four young artists with historical photographs from the collection of François Pinault.
Whether the curatorial concept of the show is so ingenious remains to be seen. However, the reach that Spivakov and Stallmann have generated with their activities within two years is considerable. “We’re just super communicative.” Many contacts are made through friends, says Stallmann, and above all through Instagram: “I write to everyone I meet and reply to all messages, according to the motto: no shame and no false embarrassment.”
Many of her clients come from the start-up scene or the consulting industry and are just realizing that there is more to the world than the job. And there’s none of the exclusivity associated with the art world, which was prevalent even at the apartment gallery parties of the ’90s. “The great exchange has brought us very far in a short time. We pick people up where they are instead of lecturing them.”
Navigating back and forth between pedestrian zone and luxury lifestyle: In a world with sharing on the one hand and super wealth on the other end of the self-realization chain, that somehow sounds like success.
„Do you live here?“, bis 28. Februar, Galerie Stallmann, Berlin