EThere are people who are so one with what they are doing in life that they seem to be in a constant flow. Isabella Bortolozzi is such a person. When the Berlin gallery owner speaks, it is as if a wave of emotions and enthusiasm spreads through the room, through which she dives from one topic to the next, only to always end up back where it belongs: with art . Or rather: with her artists, with whom on the one hand she seems to have grown almost physically, on the other hand she stands before them like a lioness.
Bortolozzi is an exception on the German gallery scene. Their program includes some of the most important and unusual artists of our time. Among them are digital video artist Ed Atkins, as well as trans-performance film artist Wu Tsang and surrealist Carol Rama.
The latter two will be presented from April in the main exhibition of the Venice Biennale “The Milk of Dreams”. Bortolozzi has a knack for artists before others see or rediscover them. As different as they are, they all have something marginal, performative and physical about them.
Most recently, she showed an exhibition by Vaginal Davis in her gallery: an all-round artist and drag queen who combines performance, film, music, installation, photography and poetry in an exuberant total work of art that anticipates almost everything that concerns the younger generation today . Thanks to Bortolozzi, the local art world has only just found out that Davis moved to Berlin from Los Angeles years ago.
Works by Leila Hekmat and other artists from Galerie Bortolozzi in the exhibition “In the Company of”
Quelle: Installation view, In the Company of, Eden Eden, 2021. Courtesy the artists and Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi/Photos Graysc.
It was a similar story with the Turin painter Carol Rama, who died in 2015 at the age of 97: Bortolozzi brought her gloomy, erotic work to life while she was still alive and helped the self-taught artist to later fame. At the same time representing a young artist like Ed Atkins, whose videos are also of a strange morbidity, shows how effortlessly Bortolozzi bridges the generations and genres, creating an amazing consistency that can hardly be found in any other gallery and the nevertheless represents the opposite of a classic program gallery in which all artists pull on the same aesthetic strand.
“I’m interested in the politically wounded body, not the bourgeois ornamentation that often passes for art,” says Bortolozzi. “I’m looking for works that don’t want to be consumed immediately, that to a certain extent evade the gaze.”
Gallery space on the street in Berlin
The actor Hans Albers used to live in her gallery on the Schöneberger Ufer – the built-in shelves and niches made of dark wood give the rooms something organic. For a few years there has been a second, untreated room called “Eden Eden”: a former pharmacy on Bülowstrasse, right on the street.
Works by Meret Oppenheim and Carol Rama at Bortolozzi Gallery
Quelle: Installation view, In the Company of, Eden Eden, 2021. Courtesy the artists and Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi/Photos Graysc.
Bortolozzi opened it “so she wouldn’t get bored,” which she does from time to time in Berlin. She’s been here since 2004 – and yet you get the feeling that she never really got there, let alone became transparent. Maybe it’s because she didn’t pursue a classic gallery career: she was neither a partner nor a long-term employee of another gallery, and she didn’t study art either.
“I grew up in Friuli, northern Italy, near Casarsa della Delizia, where Pier Paolo Pasolini also lived. He described the area as a mysterious land between the Alps and the sea. In fact, Friuli is enigmatic and poetic, which is also reflected in the dialect,” says Bortolozzi, who likes to switch wildly between English, German and Italian and whose vocabulary ranges from Dante’s “Inferno” to construction workers’ talk.
In fact, she translated literature before deciding to pursue art – a subject that has accompanied her since childhood but only became important after the death of her father. The family ran a hotel, or rather, her mother did, because her father, born in 1914, was soon too old to work. But he did collect Old Master paintings, church bells and rare books.
“I think my first encounter with art was when I walked into a hotel room where my father kept an erotic painting said to be a Delacroix. We kids weren’t allowed into the room until we were of legal age, but of course I snuck in before then. That’s probably how it all started.”
Bortolozzi started under prefabricated buildings
When her father died, the daughter was in her early twenties. She set about documenting and archiving his collection. “Travelling back in time along his paths and all the stories connected to the pieces influenced me a lot.”
Bortolozzi took her first, rather sobering steps as a gallery assistant in Turin, only to then – with a gesture that set something like the basic tone of her work – open her own gallery in Berlin: in a 27 square meter glass pavilion between prefab buildings, not far from Alexanderplatz .
She made her debut with Slovak artist and self-proclaimed “Ufonaut” Julius Koller, who painted a question mark on the gallery floor. The place quickly became a magnet for young artists, who soon became very well known.
Bortolozzi showed Danh Vo before everyone else and as the first gallery in Europe Seth Price, who asked the hardcore metal band Spasm to a concert before the opening – promptly the great, recently deceased Dan Graham walked over from his gallery exhibition next door to meet the younger ones to hang out
“Don’t get bogged down in self-branding”
How did she manage to build up a worldwide reputation without attaching herself to the Berlin label that was so typical of the noughties and eventually fading away? Generating a consistency beyond trends that does not stand for an era, but for artistic quality that tells of vulnerability, of dreamlike, dark poetry?
View of the “Eden Eden” exhibition “In the Company of”, Isabella Bortolozzi Gallery
Quelle: Installation view, In the Company of, Eden Eden, 2021. Courtesy the artists and Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi/Photos Graysc.
“As a gallery owner, you have to remain open to the unknown and not get bogged down in self-branding,” says Bortolozzi. Exactly with this unpredictability, with which she conjured up the 87-year-old Neapolitan Giuseppe Desiato, whose action photographs look like a mixture of Catholic memorabilia and Dario Argento’s horror film “Suspiria”, Bortolozzi has advanced to become one of the most relevant galleries of all.
And yet: In Berlin she still has a special role, she herself feels almost “foreign”. For a long time she had no German artists in her program. The majority of their clientele comes from the USA or France. Is Berlin still the right place?
Bortolozzi shakes his head. “The city is constantly trying to justify itself, constantly searching for its own identity. She desperately wants to be relevant but often comes across as provincial – and nothing is more provincial than wanting to be relevant.”
If you consider the current run on NFT, which is celebrated in some Berlin galleries like the arrival of a techno god who finally puts the city back on the party map, but which are actually just expensive digital kitsch, you can see once again how Berlin clinging to quick money.
The fact is: Isabella Bortolozzi is as independent, idiosyncratic and authentic as a gallery owner can be. She can curse and kill with looks just as much as she takes people into her heart. The coolness of the Berlin art scene, which has lost charisma and credibility over the years and which hardly anyone insists on anymore, was never her thing.
Maybe that’s what the Germans don’t understand about this woman: How you can be tough but warm, loud but quiet, quirky but stylish without serving the typical art world look. In this country, it is always a bit suspect not to fit into any category.