Oh la la, Daniel Richter’s new exhibition at Contemporary Fine Arts in Berlin is not what most avid viewers of the artist’s work have come to expect. While it includes over two dozen new paintings by Richter, in a style that is undeniably his own, a number of select new elements leave the exhibition less reconciled – open to the future.

The new paintings have none of the brash immediate impact of Richter’s previous larger works. In actuality, the new lot of small paintings on view, ask that one come closer and have acute attention to detail. Richter’s palette is still tagged and tainted with his orange neon. The subject matter is macabre in a number of the works. In Cazareta (2009), two wolves occupy a snowy field and beyond them the edge of a lake; they notice the viewer and stare back through gleaming blue eyes. In another entitled Winterreise 5 (2009) a ghastly cloaked figure skirts across another snowy field. Behind the spectre looms a thick dark wood. Arguably now traditional in many ways, the new paintings extend the dialog already established in Richter’s paintings between the supernatural entity and the realism of the soldier and other recurring subjects.

In a constellation through the gallery, on both floors, are gigantic crystals, brought in from Hamburg for the exhibition. A huge geode of Amethyst is backed up against the wall to sit between two paintings. In the center the gallery, a slab of petrified wood, on which two other geological marvels are stationed, diagonally divides the space. As found objects, the minerals have a significant relationship to the painting. Being hundreds of millions of years old, the stones suggest a viewpoint near the eternal when interpreting the paintings. In moving between stone and oil, one can’t help but look at the works in terms of epochs and eras, seeing the painter as shaper of time.

Daniel Richter was born in 1962 in Eutin, Germany. Richter has shown his work in galleries and institutions across the world, including recent exhibitions at the Denver Art Museum, the Essl Museum, Regen Projects in Los Angeles, and David Zwirner Gallery in New York. He lives and works in Berlin and Hamburg.

Continuing through the rest of the month at Holzmarktstrasse 3 in Berlin-Mitte is an installation of new works by Berlin artist Edward Clive entitled In The Future We Will Exercise For Fun. The ambitious suite of works contains several large sculptural display units; complete with shelfs, photographs, and small sculptures, they describe an uncanny, and occasionally monstrous relationship of the body to space.

What makes the works so at home in the the large unfinished office space is the base quality of their materials. The works’ plastic sheeting, unfinished drywall, and rudimentary armatures, are well-paired with the space’s unpainted walls, exposed ventilation system, and raw concrete floor. While the works employs such ubiquitous materials, each work rewards the curious viewer as photographs, notes, and easily overlooked, well-made formal nuances abound.

Found squatting behind walls or loitering in the far reaches of the space are a number of small sculptures. One entitled Lump Goddess (2008) is a squat and abstracted mutant figure composed of select found objects. Faceless, it sports four round cylinder legs and a single metallic claw, made from fake nails in their plastic case. Another similar work, Goth Or Hip-Hop (2009), conflates the aesthetics of science fiction with those of mid-century modernist sculpture. With fake nails, mustaches, teeth, and scars in a number of works, the aesthetic of costume cosmetics is central to the sculptures, making biological what would otherwise be inanimate. Along with a saran-wrap labyrinth containing a number of internet-found images relating to the body, Clive’s work is both detritus from a grade-school science fair sometime in the far future and an acute description of how form constructs the body and space.

Edward Clive (b. 1982) is an artist living and working in Berlin. He received his B.A. in Sculpture from the University of Brighton. His work has been previously exhibited at Keith Talent Gallery in London, BabelKunst in Trondheim, Norway, and ETC Gallery in Prague.

Entitled Soft Skills, Birgit Megerle’s exhibition at Galerie Neu in Berlin presents her most recent suite of paintings. Megerle’s past exhibition in 2007 at Daniel Reich Gallery in New York laid the groundwork for using the gallery’s physical space to make painting theatrical. At Galerie Neu, she extends this line of thinking, showing how ideas are transposed between painting, music and literature.

A flaneur smokes his pipe, caught in a stroll, he glances sideways towards the viewer. His riding boots gleam in a gentle light, just like the locks of his straight brown hair. He’s haughty and a bit sly. His life-size counterpart faces him from the side of the space. Hidden behind her dark jumper and polka dot sleeves, she may be as deceitful as she is demure. Told by the canvas laying face up on the gallery floor, something nefarious has transpired – a murder for reasons still unknown. One sees a figure – a boy with fair skin wearing blue jeans – laying limp and lifeless across a rectangular abstraction. Its palette of faded sage, turquoise, and olive greens make for eccentric tiling. As romantic as it is criminal, Megerle’s paintings ask that one imagine what series of events has led to this point. These figures are further characterized by a number of abstract geometric works. Their patterns and texture emulate architectural reliefs or patterned fabric and arguably are the strongest works in giving the exhibition its calculated aesthetic. While the size of the works are quite different, they each still impart a feeling of a small vignette, which comprises the larger. Trying to create linearity is futile, as anything that gets pieced together is just as easily rehashed into another story. What does create continuity is the specific piano soundtrack Megerle created. The track is synonymous with the sensual aesthetic of the work; no matter in what medium Megerle works, there is nuance and deliberation.

Birgit Megerle is a painter in Berlin. In the past, her work has been exhibited at Galerie Drantmann in Brussels, Galleria Fonti in Naples, and Galerie Christian Nagel in Cologne. She is represented by Galerie Neu in Berlin and Daniel Reich Gallery in New York City.