BERLIN, A ROUGH CUT

The twin sisters, who live in Berlin-Mitte/Kreuzberg, transform the exhibition space into a walk-in storyboard of their urban everyday life, exploring the boundaries between painting, installation, and artistic fieldwork. Trained at institutions including Hunter College in New York, the Rhode Island School of Design, and in Annette Messager's studio at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, the artists have lived and worked in Berlin for over 15 years. Their work focuses on inconspicuous everyday phenomena, which they imbue with a surprising, sometimes surreal, dimension through subtle humor and precise observation.

For “Berlin, A Rough Cut,” they employ a cinematic dramaturgy: The exhibition is conceived as a montage of scenes created at different times and in different locations, coalescing into an open narrative. Paintings, sculptures, and series of works enter into a dialogue; fragments gain new meaning through proximity and rhythm. Among the works on display are large-format paintings of discarded sofas or mattresses, transformed into silent portraits of urban change.

Series such as the "Calendar Pages," dated 2032, stage the future as a memory already past. Sculptures made of "liquid wood" and epoxy resin play with material illusion, while papier-mâché doves bring a piece of Berlin asphalt into the gallery. Drawings of official envelopes and banknotes illuminate, with subtle wit, the tension between the individual and the system.

The Petschatnikovs see themselves as anthropologists of everyday life. Berlin—especially the area around Heinrich-Heine-Straße, marked by ruptures and historical layers—forms their central field of research.

"Berlin, A Rough Cut" is an homage to the unfinished and the imperfect. The artists capture those moments that lie just before or after an event, making the overlooked visible – an invitation to sharpen our focus on the ordinary.