Despite its whimsical connotations, “fairytale” is a tricky word. It may suggest folklore and fantasy, but it also has everything to do with unattainable ideals. Often, fairytales are variations on the age-old Adam and Eve theme, stories about desire and its sinister consequences.

Fairytale of Berlin, the current exhibition at Scion Space in Los Angeles, turns the complexity of modern day fairytales into a visceral, material experience. Curated by Janine Bean and Matthais Bergemann, Fairytale delves into the mythical appeal that has brought so many international artists to Berlin over the past decade. The eleven artists and one artist collective included in the exhibition hail from different parts of the world and have distinctly different reasons for participating in Berlin’s burgeoning art scene. But now they’ve become part of the hype and have added their own voices to the creative production that’s stewing in Berlin neighborhoods.

Fairytale of Berlin is a smartly organized, visually seductive exhibition that highlights the sensual, expressive potentials of contemporary art while simultaneously questioning art’s place in contemporary culture. In the below email exchange, curators Bean and Bergemann talked to me about their vision for the exhibition, the ups and downs of Berlin’s thriving art scene, and what it’s like to live in a city that is constantly changing.

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Michael Kohn Gallery recently opened a duo-artist exhibition SHE: Images of Women by Wallace Berman & Richard Prince on January 15th. The exhibition is situated within a loose conceptual framework that foregrounds both Wallace Berman and Richard Prince‘s representations of women within their oeuvre. The exhibit was curated by critic and journalist, Kristine McKenna. McKenna seemed particularly apt to curate the show, as in 2007 she co-wrote a monograph with Lorraine Wild that focused on Berman, entitled Wallace Berman Photographs. The book itself was selected as one of the 50 best art books of the year by the A.I.G.A.

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Tim Rollins and K.O.S. (Kids of Survival) have been collaborating for over two decades since the 1984 launch of Rollins’ “Art and Knowledge Workshop” in the Bronx. The workshop included at risk students who began calling themselves Kids of Survival. They have since exhibited worldwide and their work is represented in the Museum of Modern Art, the Hirshhorn Museum of Art, and the Tate Gallery London.

The artists are currently presenting a new body of work inspired by the words of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., Harriet Jacobs, Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison and Malcolm X at Lehmann Maupin Gallery‘s Chelsea location. The ten new paintings in the exhibition consist of literary and historical book pages layered onto canvas with images painted directly on top of these texts. In Letter from Birmingham Jail #2 (after the Rev. Dr. M. L. King, Jr.), the black bars are both a literal reference to King’s confinement when he wrote and to the social injustice of the day.

Rollins studied fine art at the University of Maine and earned a B.F.A. from the School of the Visual Arts in New York. Rollins completed graduate studies in art education and philosophy at New York University before beginning to teach art for special education middle school students in a South Bronx public school.

Opening this week at the relatively new Chicago space Thrones Gallery is a solo exhibition entitled Brink: The Intersection of Play and Intention, with new work by Southern California native and Chicago-based artist Matt Nichols. For Nichols’ first solo show at the gallery, he has created an ambitious installation of highly conceptual and playful nature. Dealing with the idea of “play”, Nichols’ work explores “the relevance of assigned value within daily experience”. His investigation into this theme is made manifest in the form of mostly abstract objects, often employing repetitive imagery, that visually allude to childhood memories– but which are created, obviously, by the experienced hands of a person matured beyond those formative years, someone with the advantage of adult perception. These objects are found in many forms, including a set of large scale drawings of the word “siberia” repeated over 1000 times and in a hanging chocolate covered bug zapper, among various other drawings and mixed media installations.

The opening reception for Brink will be Friday, February 6th, 6-9PM at the gallery’s third floor space at 123 N. Jefferson Street in Chicago’s West Loop gallery district. The exhibition runs through February 22, 2009.

Matt Nichols is an MFA candidate at the School of the Art Institute Chicago. He received his BA from University of California, Berkeley. His work has been exhibited recently at Thrones Gallery and the Los Angeles Municipal Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, among others. He was a 2009 nominee for the New Insight Project at Art Chicago.

Gladstone Gallery is presenting the work of Puerto Rico-based artists Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla. The artists have been working together sine 1995 producing films, installations, performances, and sculpture. They expose the complicated dynamics of contemporary geo-political realities while engaging with history.

The exhibition, Stop, Repair, Prepare: Variations on Ode to Joy for a Prepared Piano, features an early 20th century Bechstein piano that Allora and Calzadilla have carved a hole in, rendering two full octaves inoperative. A performer stands in this void and must play the instrument both upside down and backwards while at times physically moving the piano along a path throughout the gallery. Hourly performances of the Fourth Movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, commonly known as Ode to Joy, by several pianists take place on Tuesdays through Saturdays. This musical composition has long symbolized human fraternity and universal brotherhood, and is today the official anthem of the European Union. The incomplete version of the ode (due to the hole) probes the relationships between composition and meaning, while tracking political and artistic sentiments.

Allora and Calzadilla have had several solo exhibitions around the world, including at the Whitechapel Art Gallery and Serpentine Gallery in London, and Palais de Tokyo in Paris. Stop, Repair, Prepare will remain at Gladstone Gallery until February 21st.

Nicole Klagsbrun is currently presenting a series of performance stills from Mika Rottenberg’s recent project for W Magazine. For this project, Rottenberg built a set in her Harlem studio which contained several rooms devoted to different characters with corporeal curiosities, primarily female. These actors perform tasks with substances, such as dough and cheese, that often mimic their own anatomical characteristics.

Rottenberg’s video installations explore the relationship between the body and production, such as in

Mary’s Cherries, 2003. In this work, subjects collaborate in the process of transforming red fingernails into maraschino cherries. Rottenberg was included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial and has upcoming solo exhibitions at La Maison Rouge in Paris, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and will be included in a group show at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao in 2009.

The series of performance stills will remain at Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery until February 28th. The exhibition is accompanied by the release of a smaller format print portfolio.

Chicago’s Tony Wight Gallery is currently presenting an exhibition of new sculptural works by Scott Fife.

For the exhibition Fife presents four new additions to his ongoing series of larger-than-life cardboard heads. Rather than molding polished marble forms–like the classical busts of the Roman Republic that his works reference–Fife’s constructions are roughly hewn from raw, gray, archival cardboard with screws, glue, and pencil markings all highly visible.

Among the works on view are two busts of the artist Ed Kienholz. These works are a slight departure for Fife in that Kienholz was not only a well-known artist but also a mentor and friend. Fife’s depictions of Kienholz, one younger and one older, disclose his familiarity with his mentor’s emotional stance and mannerisms. This knowledge results in two very direct and intimate descriptions of the man he knew. In contrast to the specificity present in the Kienholz pieces, a bust representing Cassius Clay (the future Muhammad Ali) is noticeably more stylized. In perhaps the most curious bust in the exhibition, a young Abraham Lincoln is pictured without facial hair.

Scott Fife (American, b. 1949) has shown widely both nationally and internationally. Recent solo exhibitions includeBig Trouble: The Idaho Project at the Boise Art Museum, (Boise, Idaho) which traveled to the Salt Lake Art Center, (Salt Lake City, Utah) and Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture (Spokane, Washington). Group exhibitions include Beauty is Embarrassing at Western Project (Los Angeles); Frida Kahlo: Images of an Icon at the Tacoma Art Museum (Tacoma, Washington); Swallow Harder: Selections from the Ben and Aileen Krohn Collection at the Frye Museum of Art (Seattle). In 2009, Fife will mount a solo exhibition at the Missoula Museum of Art in Montana.