Marta Dyachenko :re

Marta Dyachenko’s new series of concrete-based sculptures, wall reliefs, and works on paper come together in meticulously orchestrated arrangements. In a site-specific installation whose point of departure is the Volksbühne (“People’s Theatre“) across the street from the gallery, :re examines the relationship between inside and outside, between exhibition space and urban space, between fragment, model, and scale. Built in 1913, the Volksbühne is one of the most iconic theatre buildings in Berlin. By the gallery’s entrance, three lithographs printed on birch paper show, among other things, loaded container ships and fragments of buildings before a hilly landscape. In the anteroom of the main exhibition space, the concrete sculpture schiffbar ent_mach(t)ung (2022), replica of the Russian oligarch Usmanov’s mothballed yacht, is accompanied by four watercolor studies. In the gallery’s main space, eight sculptural elements form what Dyachenko calls a “ruin garden,” whose central component is a concrete carrier platform with a steel girder we are to imagine as extending through the ceiling of the exhibition space. The installation reflects the characteristic coexistence of destruction and reconstruction in the artist’s work. In Dyachenko’s art, fragments as symbols of destruction are equipped with shiny steel girders as the seeds of construction and new beginnings. These disparate yet coexisting states are also manifest in Dyachenko’s 1.3m-diameter wall reliefs, which orbit her landscape of ruins and incorporate archived images of destroyed or reconstructed buildings. With two outdoor sculptures, one in front of the gallery building and one in the green space between Almstadtstraße and Rosa-Luxemburg-Straße, Dyachenko breaks out of the exhibition space, complementing her references to the Volksbühne and Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz with a direct connection to the site.