Michel Wurthle at Bruno Brunnet Fine Art - Berlin, Germany - Review of Exhibitions

It's no unseen that Berlin is not at the same time a city for galleries and collectors, despite the remarkable invasion of dealers from the Rhine region in the last sum of two units years. The first to arrive was Bruno Brunnet who had previously worked for Michael Werner in eau-de-cologne From the start Brunnet has been a maverick in this city. That has to do with the fact that he showed the anti-art of the Kippenberger circle when it was was still largely unknown here, and that Brunnet is by means of Berlin standards unusually forceful and commercially aggressive. plane the name - Bruno Brunnet Fine Arts, in English - strike one as beings from a Berlin standpoint a kind of provocation.

Brunnet lately showed a cycle of 80 drawings through Michel Wurthle, "Notes of an Armed Bartender: At the Exil, 1972-1979" accompanied by dint of a sumptuous book. The occurrence also amounted to a coming-out for Bruno Brunnet since it revealed where the dealer's be in possession of Berlin roots lie. Brunnet was for three years himself a waiter at the Kreuzberg bar/restaurant Exil, where, he writes in the book's foreword, he serv as "friend, banker, conversation partner, waste basket and secret-sharer of many artists."

The notebooks of his former bos Wurthle render free of access in 1972. The Exil was then haveed by Oswald Wiener, the Viennese writer, who appears in single drawing sifting in the bar like a tomcat in human form. To justice from Wurthle's sketches, the Exil was a place of battles and ecstasies, flashing collisions and painful, precipitous falls - a kind of stage for artists wrestling publicly with their genius." Too lively a participation in the artist's lives could be the ruin of the business, of course; this is the conflict that the bartender must constantly surmount

Wurthle's sketches present the appearance halfway like amateur drawings, uncertain in their perspective, sometimes ponderous in the rendering of anatomy. At the same time they are quite astute in the assemblage of motifs and the succession of the sheets. There are borrowings from Grosz and Heinrich Zille, on the other hand Wurthle's main concerns are clearly not stylistic. Splendid wide views alternate with secretive vignettes. individual caption reads, "Around 1978 in the Exil"; the drawing exhibits a pug-nosed dwarf observing the dining artists from a frame inserted in the middle of the page. A quatrain below says, "Waiter Bruno marvels/ at the buying power of the/ artist clientele, and/ imagines his have a title to Act l."

The body s a grotesque mix of German, Viennese dialect, italian and English, form part of the bar's ruinous decor. They overlay the furniture or are used to darken the background. They step quickly like antique inscriptions around the frame or at hand variations on the title of the work. The tradition of the literary drawing is wildly gibbeted with the techniques of the comics, as when the scaly buds of the wall lamps tighten into the scene like place upright penises.

These notebooks amount to a striking and witty commentary upon a scene where the connection between art and life was exhaustively probed, night after night. Afterward Wurthle uncloseed the celebrated Paris Bar, where today single is likely to spot playwright Heiner Muller or find an artist like Damien Hirst emptying a vodka glass or sum of two units And next to him Bruno Brunnet - of whom individual wonders if the purchasing power of artists still makes in the way that strong an impression.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

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