7 emerging Berlin artists you need to know in 2019

You don’t need us to tell you that Berlin is something of a Mecca when it comes to attracting emerging and underground artists. Every year, young artists flock to the city in their droves in search of bright studio spaces, rustic artist abodes, cheap beer and döner, and of course, a nightlife just ripe for exhibition opening tales of excess. And unlike its counterparts in London, Paris or New York, the art scene here is also relatively accessible due to state-funded galleries and a plethora of independent projects spaces that stud the city from Wedding to Weserstraße. As we start a new year, we take a look at some of the most promising artists making waves in the German capital — from those who are just shy of making their big breakthrough to those bubbling beneath the surface. Here are some of our favourites:

Tim Plamper

At first, Tim Plamper’s work makes you blink and see double. His practice exists somewhere in the intersection between traditional drawing and internet art as he materialises digital images by drawing them. His large-scale works depict strange, fragmented corporeal landscapes, but it’s unclear whether his rendering of body is intended to be erotic or sadistic. By creating a tension between digital imagery and drawing, Plamper’s pictures make apparent how increasingly dependent we are on screens, and how they affect the way we see and understand the world. He is currently showing work at Not Dark Yet, running through to 27 January Kunsthaus Muerz.

Elana Katz

Performance artist Elana Katz has been based in Berlin since 2008. Her style of performance follows in the footsteps of artists like Marina Abromovic and Yoko Ono, but Katz brings new perspectives to the genre, inflecting her practice with myriad contradictions. She uses her body in a manner that forces the viewer to consider the inconsistencies of the way they look at things, directly playing with the expectations of harm and comfort to challenge people’s viewpoints. Her most recent piece, Ko-Präsenz, took place DEDE Project Space where she invited audience members to lay with her on pillows of ice.

Malte Bartsch

Malte Bartsch caught our attention because of the inclusive, interactive and social components to his practice. A student of Ólafur Eliasson, Bartsch became a name in Berlin last year with his piece, FEUERWERKAUTOMAT  — an intervention at this year’s German reunification celebrations. Designed as an app where members of the public could purchase fireworks and create a display based on democratic polls, FEUERWERKAUTOMAT indicated the unpredictable nature of the voting process. In September at the Biesenthal, the multidisciplinary artist exhibited an old ATM reconfigured as a wood burning stove. Audiences were encouraged to burn their money, if they so wished.

Anna Uddenberg

Although it might be a push to regard Anna Uddenberg as “emerging” (she first came to our attention back in 2016 when her work at the Berlin Biennale saturated our timelines), nonetheless she is still an artist to watch this year. Working at her Neukölln studio, Uddenberg, a Swedish sculptor who studied at the Swedish Royal Institute of Art, creates sculptures that shrewdly comment upon our deeply entrenched relationship with consumerism. Her sculptures combine faux luxury materials with figures that contort and bend in ways that emulate the fetishisation of women’s bodies.

Stefanie Gutheil

In the last few years, Stefanie Gutheili has risen to prominence in Berlin on account her characteristically unpretentious low-fi aesthetic. Upon glimpsing her playfully surreal paintings, you’ll begin to wonder whether you’ve been slipped a hallucinogenic as a variety of anthropomorphic creatures and monsters frolic through her colourful scenes. These creatures reject the uniformity of the everyday and offer the viewer a trippy escape to a bizarre other world. Her work has been exhibited internationally in New York, Helsinki and Portugal, with her most recent show taking place at the Red Bull Music Academy curated by Johann König.

Theresa Volpp

Theresa Volpp is a recent graduate from the Art Academy in Düsseldorf and studied under the renowned painter, Katharina Grosse. We came across her work at Schaufenster Gallery in the group show, Dirty Voyage, in 2018, where her abstract approach to painting caught our eye. Volpp’s work explores how a canvas might be “a limiting and art historically-loaded, medium” but how it can articulate something nonverbal and complex at the same time.

Jeewi Lee

Originally from Seoul, Jeewi Lee has been based in Berlin since 2008. By using natural materials such as salt and rock, Jeewi investigates the trace left by human activity, reimagining it as a luminescent stamp. Her most arresting piece, Blinder Beifall (2016), consists of a circus ring composed of salt instead of sand, flanked with large white kerbstones. Jeewi then invited a variety of entertainers to perform in the salt — the final art work was the marks left in the substance.