Since Jay died I have been having this irresistible urge to look at art (mostly free) and learn about art (mostly free, sometimes comes with wine at openings) and buy art (oops! -- not free) In the spirit of jay/day, I've been concentrating on young artists (30ish).
I've become very interested in a group of young artists in Berlin, all of whom studied together in Leipzig. You can check them out at http://www.liga-galerie.de/index.html-- LIGA gallery is a coop set up in Berlin by the artists, who hired a director to promote them outside Germany. (They are already represented by a gallery in Leipzig.) A few of them have begun to be shown in the US, most recently Tom Fabritius at Sandroni.Rey in LA. Some of the others will be shown there in the next year.
I visited the gallery in Berlin a couple weeks ago, and went to a museum where some of them are showing in Leipzig. Leipzig, as you may know (but I did not) was the seat of the begininng of the resistance to the GDR, and where the riots began which led to the downfall of the GDR and the reunification of Germany. It has a rich art history and a top art school. Before reunification, selling art commercially was forbidden in the GDR, so people taught art and made art, but couldn't sell it. Today a lot of the people who were painting in those years are teachers at the school there, but were never able to build their own careers. Instead they are helping to nurture these younger artists.
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