Zyrland Zoiropa, Berlin

Liam Allan, Burkhard Beschow

Zyrland Zoiropa presents artworks by two artists, Liam Allan and Burkhard Beschow. Both artists create delicate objects exploring the complexity of ‘place’.

 

Drawings by Liam Allan are immensely detailed depictions of unspecified historical objects—artefacts from anonymous museum collections. The drawings are laboriously detailed; the intricate pencil marks are clearly visible up close but form a photo-like image from a distance. The artworks are titled after nations and peoples unrelated to the depicted objects, assigning a meaning to the objects that is evidently false.

 

Accompanying Allan’s drawings are mixed-media sculptures by Burkhard Beschow. In Beschow’s art practice, he engages in ongoing projects focused on specific places. In his last exhibition, for example, he created sculptures inspired by the German town ‘Bitterfeld,’ once the most polluted town in Europe. Beschow’s mixed-media sculptures capture the essence of a place, often post-industrial wastelands. Raised in East Germany, he has a fascination with the societal and economic transitions that occurred after 1989—how the post-GDR landscape was transformed and the ensuing entropy and sense of abandonment that followed.

 

At the Zyrland Zoiropa presentation for Art-O-Rama, framed pictures by Allan adorn the walls, while mixed-media sculptures by Beschow add a three-dimensional element. Overall, the presentation raises questions about how objects can convey meaning related to place or how meaning, real or imagined, is attributed to objects from specific places.

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