Family Affair: Boris Berlin, Daniel Berlin, Germans Ermičs

The stripping down to the essentials of the 20th-century modernist movement did not only remove the ornaments and superfluous details from architecture and design, it simultaneously made space for other elements to further interact with form – light, space, color, movement, materials, crafts and new technologies - paving the way for an interdisciplinary approach, of which the Bauhaus is an illustrious example. In that respect, the artists of the exhibition Modernism Crystallized (Family Affair), Boris Berlin, Daniel Berlin and Germans Ermičs, are children of modernism. Their empirical approach and material-oriented vocabulary seem to rise like a second wave from its main explorations: focus on materials paired with new technologies and craftsmanship; perception of form, light and space; urban esthetics with a tendency towards geometric abstraction. Even the concept behind the exhibition echoes the collective approach of the modernist movement. When inviting Boris Berlin to exhibit in my gallery, the Russianborn designer responded by asking his son, Danish architect Daniel Berlin (of Snøhetta) and Latvian designer Germans Ermičs (whom he affectively considers his adopted son), to create the works with him, some collaboratively in pairs, others individually, in a twilight zone between art, design and architecture.