heavy souls and weightless bronze | inside the brodin gallery

Ludger Paffrath.

Berlin window shopping takes an unexpected turn from 27 April to 9 May as the Kaufhaus des Westens hands over its entire street-facing facade to contemporary artists. Arriving for Gallery Weekend Berlin, the exhibition titled ‘DISPLAY, PAUSE, REPEAT’ transforms ten windows along Tauentzienstraße into public installations. Curator Sebastian Hoffmann ignores the urge to push retail, treating the glass boxes as a pure artistic medium. 

Operating for nearly 120 years and spanning over 60,000 square metres, KaDeWe remains one of the most significant luxury department stores globally. Offering everything from high fashion to gourmet food, the iconic space now hosts an impressive roster of international galleries. 

Ludger Paffrath.

Ludger Paffrath.

Passersby will encounter works by Talking Heads frontman and visual artist David Byrne presented by Pace, alongside conceptual pieces from the late Hanne Darboven via Sprüth Magers. Contemporary sculptor Simon Denny represents Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, joining installations by Leila Hekmat, Ken Lum, Claudia Mann, Harry Nuriev, Kayode Ojo, Sophie Reinhold and Ian Waelder. Hoffmann himself brings a unique perspective as a Berlin-born curator and co-founder of the creative agency TADAN, which he runs alongside Stella von Senger and Cecil von Renner.

This marks the second year Hoffmann has convinced the luxury department store to remove all retail items from its prime street-facing real estate. The concept frames the windows as three-dimensional stages that audiences can only view from the outside, creating a dynamic where the reflection of the traffic and passing crowds becomes part of the viewing experience. Passersby can either walk past without noticing or stop to take in the installations, transforming a busy shopping street into a temporary outdoor museum that requires no tickets and has no opening hours.

Ludger Paffrath.

Ludger Paffrath.

Moving beyond the pavement, the project infiltrates the interior of the department store for the very first time. Shoppers on the second floor will find a custom escalator video installation by Heiner Franzen, while an excerpt from Hanne Darboven’s ‘Opus 25A: Ludwig van Beethoven’ plays loudly every hour across the entire building.

A new audio guide voiced by Hoffmann provides context for the individual pieces in both German and English, accessible via QR codes printed on the glass. The chosen title points to the temporal nature of the work, where the installations interact with the constant movement of one of Berlin’s busiest streets. Putting contemporary art in a commercial setting is not a new idea; Salvador Dalí famously designed windows in New York and ended up smashing one of them in a fit of rage.

While nobody expects any broken glass on Tauentzienstraße, replacing luxury goods with video art and sculptural works forces the city to pause and look at something other than the latest trends.

Ludger Paffrath.

Find out more here.

photography. courtesy of Ludger Paffrath
words. Gennaro Costanzo

Agony + Ecstasy Gallery has announced the publication of ‘Walter Rudolph, Ibiza 1976’, a new photography book edited by the gallery’s founder, Emma Salahi. Released on 29 April 2026, the book acts as a vivid archival portal into Ibiza during the most pivotal moment in its history: on the cusp of becoming a global tourism destination. 

Walter Rudolph, a German-born photojournalist, spent the better part of his life travelling and capturing the world through his lens. In the 1960s and ‘70s, he worked with airline and tour operators Thomson (TUI) and Iberia, photographing holiday destinations for travel brochures and international photo agencies. During this period of significant and rapid tourism growth, Rudolph’s work helped promote emerging destinations worldwide. 

Shot on Kodak film, Rudolph’s photography captures the world through an unstaged, uncurated lens. But that’s not to say it was amateur – quite the opposite, actually. He had a keen eye, and his use of colour, texture and perspective feels akin to the work of photographer Slim Aarons and film director Wes Anderson. His observational compositions, combined with his use of natural sunlight – particularly golden hour – are a match made in heaven, allowing him to depict the true nature of a place without it ever feeling staged. What remains abundantly clear throughout his work is his curiosity (about the place he was photographing and the cultures that existed beyond the lens) and an unhurried approach. 

Alongside his wife, who was also a photographer, Rudolph travelled to Hong Kong, Kenya, Portugal, Israel, Italy, London and across the Mediterranean. But in 1976, he found himself in Ibiza, a small Balearic Island in the Mediterranean Sea. Once again, he had arrived at a destination just before it reached widespread popularity. It almost felt as though he had the magic touch: as soon as he photographed a place, others wanted to be there, eager to experience it for themselves. 

The hippie movement was in full swing throughout the 1970s, and Ibiza reflected this cultural shift. Visitors were drawn in by its laid-back lifestyle and indulgent nightlife – the perfect balance of peacefulness and party. What makes Rudolph’s photographs of Ibiza so striking, though, is that they capture a time when the island was still, in many ways, undiscovered. The Ibiza he presents feels nostalgic, inspiring and deeply moving. Through image alone, you can sense the slow pace of life, you can feel the simplicity we all yearn for in today’s digital age.  

Fiat 600s line cobblestone streets, bringing pops of orange and green against cream façades and blue skies. Shoppers drift through town, perusing as if they have all the time in the world. Crowds gather at the Penta Club, the Fantasilandia zoo hosts its seal shows, and quiet side streets unfold into entire worlds of their own. The sun beats down, beachgoers tan, and the fashion couldn’t be any more reflective of the time. Simply put, the images transport you there –  as if you had lived them yourself. Still, this is not to suggest the absence of tourism; far from it. Within Ruldolph’s work, there exists a clear contrast between local Ibicenco women in traditional dress and airline hostesses with tourists. It’s in these moments that you witness the emergence of modern tourism. 

This publication marks Salahi’s second book, as Agony + Ecstasy Gallery – which represents Rudolph exclusively and sells limited-edition prints of his work – continues to uncover rare photographic archives from across the globe. The book features forewords from Spanish journalist and editor Juan Suárez and British art journalist Emily Steer. ‘Walter Rudolph, Ibiza 1976’ follows ‘Oriol Maspons Ibiza’, released in 2024 by IDEA, and stands as both a time capsule of the island and a continuation of Rudolph’s legacy. 

‘Walter Rudolph, Ibiza 1976’ is available now from agonyecstasygallery.com, Particular at Jondal, PEPE, Raco Verd and IDEA. The book and photographs will also be presented at Photo London from 14th to 18th May.

images. Courtesy of Agony + Ecstasy Gallery
words. Amber Louise

Florie Berger.

There’s something quietly radical about showing up to a centuries-old French champagne house with salvaged timber and no fixed plan. But that is, in essence, how Tadashi Kawamata has always worked and why Maison Ruinart came looking for him.

The Japanese artist, born in Hokkaidō in 1953 and now splitting his time between Tokyo and Paris, has spent decades placing his structures in the spaces between things: between buildings and sky, between human made and overgrown, between the intentional and the local. His belvederes, walkways and shelter accumulations of reclaimed wood have appeared at the Venice Biennale, Documenta, the Centre Pompidou and the Serpentine Gallery. However, they’ve never quite belonged to those institutions. They occupy the threshold. They grow into corners and climb facades. 

It’s perhaps fitting then, that we find his work here in Berlin this week. A city that has always understood the aesthetic and philosophical weight of in-between spaces, as part of Gallery Weekend Berlin, where Ruinart is presenting his ‘Conversations with Nature’ collaboration. The project connects France, Japan and Germany in ways that feel less orchestrated than simply right: three countries, three distinct relationships to ecological consciousness and contemporary art. 

Florie Berger.

Kawamata doesn’t begin with a concept, but with a study: drawings, loose and layered and once on site everything changes. He described this process during a recent panel talk during the opening at Palais de Tokyo – the sketches are a way of thinking, not a blueprint. Materials dictate the final form. If the wood runs out, the work is finished. It’s an ecology of working. 

That distinction matters. When Kawamata was first accumulating discarded materials on New York streets in the 1980s, he recalls those years with something like nostalgia for their raw momentum, comparing himself to a kind of urban graffiti artist responding to the city’s relentless energy. He wasn’t making environmental art. He was making art from what was available. What’s changed is the world’s context for understanding it.

Florie Berger.

Fabien Vallérian, International Art & Culture Director at Maison Ruinart, who sat with us at the press opening in Paris, puts it plainly: “Back in the 80s, he started using reclaimed materials, but it didn’t carry this particular meaning, ecology simply wasn’t a priority in the same way. Now, a new generation looks at those same works completely differently, because they bring their own investment in these questions. Kawamata has become, in some ways, a pioneer of this conversation, even though it was never his explicit intention.”

This is one of the more interesting tensions inside ‘Conversations with Nature’ as a programme: the gap between an artist’s original impulse and the significance that accumulates around it over time. Kawamata’s work has always been about building something beautiful and impermanent in a site that will outlast it. The world caught up with that instinct, and gave it an urgency he didn’t ask for.

When artists are invited into the Ruinart world for the first time, Vallérian describes a process that is genuinely open. The initial visit to the Maison in Reims takes around a day and a half: vineyards, the people tending them, the surrounding forest, the historic chalk cellars, the sculpted gardens. Then both sides pause and sit with the question of whether there’s a real fit.

Often, artists return. Some spend days with a beekeeper, or a specialist in the region’s biology, or with the cellar master. Some want to go deeper into the forest. The invitation, Vallérian explains, is truly open: “It’s carte blanche, and what matters most is the element of surprise, for us and for the viewer.”

Florie Berger.

For Kawamata, that initial encounter with Reims left something specific behind. The morning mist sitting on the vines. The sound of wind through leaves. A landscape full of creatures mostly invisible to those passing through. He took that sensory impression home and made drawings from it. Those drawings eventually grew into three permanent installations now standing at 4 Rue des Crayères, the Maison’s historic address in the Champagne region: Tree Hut, Nest and Observatory. Each one is a refuge, structures that ask you to look more carefully at what surrounds them.

One of the questions Kawamata keeps returning to in his work, and in conversation is how something can be both spectacular and minimal at the same time. His answer, typically, is: through scale and placement. When you are five metres above the ground, he has said, the world is not the same. You feel the wind differently. You hear things you’d otherwise miss.

Vallérian, describing his first encounter with Kawamata’s work, reaches for a similar language. “It’s almost organic, it seems to grow by itself, like something that appeared rather than was built. There’s a quality almost of a parasite, in the most interesting sense. And it won’t stay forever.” That impermanence is part of what makes it so compelling. The nest on the exterior of the Palais de Tokyo, an outdoor installation extended through September, shifts the way people look at the building’s concrete mass. It draws the eye to a corner they would never have noticed. “It shows that even a building like the Palais de Tokyo can serve as a kind of pioneer connection point with nature.”

Florie Berger.

What Kawamata doesn’t do is invade. Nothing is built in a way that damages what it touches. All can be removed without trace. In a world where we are reckoning what we build, what we leave behind, what we owe the places we live in, there is something quietly honorable about that restraint. Practical and honorable, to use Kawamata’s own framing.

When asked whether Kawamata might be described as a kind of wood anthropologist, someone studying the relationship between humans, materials, and the built world, Vallérian considers it, then gently redirects: “For me, he’s more of a craftsman. This isn’t just making a drawing. He chooses the location because it gives perspective. It changes how we read a landscape.” But he doesn’t entirely dismiss the anthropological reading either. Kawamata has worked in prisons. He has worked with homeless communities. His practice has always had a social dimension, a rootedness in how people actually inhabit spaces, not how spaces are supposed to be inhabited.

His move to Europe after those early New York years brought a kind of relief. He has spoken about feeling more accepted here, less pressured to constantly produce and present, given more room to work. 

Florie Berger.

This year’s collaboration with Ruinart also marks a new formal experiment for him: a large interior tornado structure built from wood. Kawamata describes it as something he had envisioned for years before this project made it possible. The interior placement was necessary, its core construction is too intricate for the elements, but there’s an additional poetry to that: a force of nature, rendered in reclaimed material. 

Vallérian is thoughtful on the question of what it means to frame ecological narratives within a luxury context, whether something is necessarily lost when the political becomes the poetic. His answer is less a deflection than a pragmatic honesty. “As a company, we don’t have that much impact when we say these things directly to our audience. But when an artist says it, through their work, through their commitment, the volume of the message changes completely.”

That’s why the reach matters too. Ruinart partners with 35 art fairs globally, where they give these collaborations an audience that extends beyond the Maison itself. Sketches, models and selected works travel with the programme where they meet viewers in cities all over the world, highlighting questions and raising awareness on ecology, impermanence, our relationship to the materials we use and the land in their own local contexts.

During Gallery Weekend Berlin 1-3 May, that feels especially resonant. This is a city that has rebuilt itself from ruins more than once, a city that understands in its bones what it means for structures to appear and disappear and leave something behind in the air of a place even after they’re gone.

Tadashi Kawamata’s ‘Conversations with Nature’ for Maison Ruinart will be presented as part of Gallery Weekend Berlin. Three permanent installations: Tree Hut, Nest and Observatory remain on view at 4 Rue des Crayères, Reims. The outdoor nest at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, continues through September.

Find out more here.

photography. courtesy of Florie Berger
words. Dave Lantinga