Last week, the city was flooded with beauty-seekers, art lovers and familiar faces – appetites sharpened for whatever Berlin Art Week had to offer. With galleries humming and openings bleeding into afterparties, there was hardly a quiet moment. Among it all was an Italian Cocktail affair hosted by YOOX x SLEEK, glasses catching the last of the evening light.
The evening took place at Schattenlos Atelier, surrounded by the work of Italian sculptor and painter Gabriella Furno. Located not far from the former Stasi prison in Hohenschönhausen, the name “Schattenlos” reflects the atelier’s intention to create a space defined by light and openness. Stepping inside that evening meant entering a sea of red light, pulling you into the vastness of the room and the strange gravity of Furno’s work. Sculptures of women and men glowed in red, orange and blue, their bodies caught mid-gesture, half-monument and half-memory. Paintings of intertwined figures unfolded in eccentric, almost feverish colour, bodies dissolving into one another until it became difficult to tell where one ended and the next began.
Dividing her time between Palermo and Berlin, Furno draws on both the layered history of the Mediterranean and Central Europe’s avant-garde legacy. Her sculptures explore human dignity and vulnerability, informed in part by the stories of migration she encountered during her years in Palermo’s Ballarò neighbourhood. Across both sculpture and painting, materials such as soil from Pantelleria bring the landscapes surrounding her practice directly into the work.
It wasn’t long before the space filled with a crowd as varied as the work around them, bringing together people from art, fashion, music and Berlin’s wider creative scene. Among the familiar faces were perfumer Geza Schoen, content creator Alina Kossan and model Maximilian Kreiner. As drinks circulated and conversations spread through the room, performer Alvin Collantes drew the crowd in with a live work exploring the intersection of ritual and spectacle, visibility and disappearance, vulnerability and resistance.
By then, there was little separation between the art in the room and the experience of simply being there, sweat-damp and glowing, drink in hand, hungry for one more hour of it. It was the kind of night that didn’t end so much as dissolve, slipping into the late dark without anyone quite noticing the seam.
All Photography by Arne Schirmer.
