Exhibitions


Press


Contact


Info


CLOSE

2025

Pedro Cera, Lisbon, Portugal (forthcoming)
ARCH, Athens, Greece (forthcoming)
Bortolami, New York, USA (forthcoming)
Thomas Schulte Galerie, Berlin, Germany (forthcoming)

2024

2023

2022

2021

2020

2019

2018

2017

2016

2015

2014

2013

2012

2011

2010

Close

Close

04.07.―16.09.2016
In Bed with M/L Artspace
9th Berlin Biennale
Berlin, Germany





In Bed Together: It is easy to be pessimistic about art in New York City these days. A river of money has been flowing into the same few hands for years. Galleries are proliferating all over town, on the Lower East Side, especially, but also in Brooklyn and Harlem, abetting gentrification, and most are rather unadventurous. Conservatism reigns in studios and museums, too. Meanwhile, art workers are being pushed out and spread apart, to the Bronx, Cypress Hills, and Yonkers, to Los Angeles, Mexico City, and Berlin. It feels topsy-turvy, dangerously stratified, like it might all fall apart pretty soon.

ML Artspace sprouted up in that environment two-and-a-half years ago, the creation of two artist-transplants to the city, Marie Karlberg and Lena Henke, of Sweden and Germany, respectively. They wanted to start a gallery that would shake things up a bit, but they didn’t have the money for real estate. And so they did the only logical thing one could do: they took it. They opened their first show beneath the monstrous Brooklyn-Queens Expressway on a warm fall evening, September 28, 2014, with works by fifteen artists. It closed the same day, after the police arrived. But that was the plan all along. These would be one-night affairs. Hundreds of people had come through by then.

There have been a total of nine events—the Berlin Biennale brings ML’s count to a round ten—in five cities on three continents in all sorts of unusual locations. Eighty-three artists have appeared, a sprawling array of choice talents, established and unknown, young and old, always at least half of them female. There is a diffuse generosity to the endeavor. Artists have complete freedom to show what they want, and they come from various circles, which sometimes loosely overlap. For one night, a new center takes hold. People show up—to revel, commiserate, and to be sure, compete.

It is a quietly personal project. “We take it step by step, but the most important thing is the friendship,” Henke told an interviewer earlier this year. Selecting venues, the two women have created an of-the-moment map of their city, as well as their extended international network—of the marginal places that matter right now, or at least the ones that are accessible. It is tempting to construct narratives from those choices, about how they chart the pair’s burgeoning careers, or even about how they might tell the story of any budding relationship, whether venturing from a nail salon (the “Nail Us” show) to a literary reading (“M/L Reads”) to a trip to L.A. for an outré art fair (“Under the Oak Tree”), or spending days and nights indulging in pleasure, at home (“In the Bedroom”), on a beach vacation in Brazil (“Piracanga Freedom?”), or at a raucous dance club in Brooklyn (“Das Gesamtsexwerk”).

Like its New York forebears—the art shows at downtown bars and clubs in the 1970s and Colab’s fly-by-night displays in disused storefronts that ran into the ‘80s, to name two—ML has allowed thrilling, diverse energies to coalesce in new locales, however briefly. Already, places it has marked are disappearing. The dance space, Spectrum, has closed. The fair, Paramount Ranch, has called it quits. But memories remain. For me, some of the strongest are from that January 2015 night at the club: Maggie Lee flitting about, handing out her bewitching, bejeweled wristbands, and Jacolby Satterwhite performing wildly with a video projection and manhandling a viewer, bringing him to the ground. And then there was that one afternoon in Venice last May, when I wandered, lost, near the Prada Foundation, and finally found ML’s tight little show in a deserted courtyard—a bit of home amid the frenzy. I have come to think that its title, being invigoratingly direct, would work perfectly as ML’s slogan: “Please Respond.”

—Andrew Russeth

  • 1 / 3
  • 2 / 3
  • 3 / 3