Ghost Exhibitions: Bernhard Martin and Street Trash Reviewed During Lockdown

Art critic Richard Leydier reviews two exhibitions that opened just before the COVID-19 lockdown in spring 2020 and are now inaccessible to the public. At Haus am Waldsee in Berlin, Bernhard Martin's solo show 'Image Ballet' (April 21–July 5, 2020) presents his shift from heterogeneous technique to pastel-toned, formally uniform paintings that retain spatial ruptures. Martin, born in 1966 in Hanover, creates allegorical enigmas featuring dung beetles, Ladurée macarons, erupting volcanoes, and office files, with influences from German Renaissance to Sigmar Polke. The catalog by Walther König documents this evolution. In Marseille, at La Friche la Belle de Mai, the group exhibition 'Street Trash' (March 13–May 10, 2020) is curated by Amandine Guruceaga and Benjamin Marianne of Tank Art Space, featuring 23 artists. Inspired by Jim Muro's 1987 B-movie about a homeless community, the show explores sculpture's 'special effect' through poor materials and waste. Highlights include Anne Wenzel's ceramic busts of men disfigured by WWI, Michel Gouéry's swirling ceramic figures, and Anita Molinero's apocalyptic landscape sculpture. Leydier laments the loss of physical viewing but notes the rise of virtual exhibitions, which he considers inferior to real spatial experiences.