The RAAB gallery

Raab Gallery was founded in former West-Berlin in 1978. For 23 years working in a Bauhaus building at Potsdamer Brücke with five meter high walls, it soon became famous for showing huge works by young Berlin artists like Elvira Bach, Rainer Fetting, Markus Lüpertz and K.h Hödicke. At the time it as well proofed to be a meeting point for emerging internantional artists such as Enzo Cucchi and Ernesto Tatafiore from Italy, Michel Alberola and Gerard Garouste from France, Donald Sultan and Chuck Close from the United States or Christopher le Brun from Great Britian, to name a few. After the wall went down Raab Galerie extended its Portfolio with an Artist from east germany: Hubertus Giebe, former master student of Bernard Heisig and lecturer at Kunstakademie Dresden. Street Art became an important issue for the last ten years, starting with by now internationaly well known berlin based Artist EL Bocho. While artists like Harald Klemm and Thomas Baumgärtel from Cologne close a gap between classical forms of artistic representation and new techniques with their stencil sprayed cavases, Raab Galerie also shows SKENAR73, a true graffiti writer. Since the gallery always strives to encurage new tendencies, plenty of group exhibitions have shown that street art and graffiti found their well deserved place in the canon of high quality contemporary art. Raab Gallery remains young and international to the day, with artists from Austria like Nina Maron and the sculpturer Martin Krammer as well as the next generation of Pop Artists such as Nuno Raminhos (Portugal), Ewen Gur (France) or Phillip Wolf (Spain). These western artists get complimented by South Korean Seoul based star artist Mari Kim, who shows that east asian art means in no way an opposition to western aesthetics but rather inspirational exchange.

current exibition:  Molly Goldfarb - Stray Vacation (17.07.24 - 13.08.24)

Stracation is about letting yourself drift on holidays ( stray and vacation), thus it is a unique occasion to increase your anticipation of a most enjoyable summertime. Plunge into cityscapes that invite to linger over a sight full of colourful and beautifull arrangements in the middle of town. You might be sitting nearby and looking at the sparkle of bright colours and the fomal juxtapositions  of shapes in a perfect cityscape. You might want to stay there and relax, you could remain hours just watching, living the easy life of summertime. Molly Goldfarb loves to travel, since she was a child she frequently visited South Florida from where  comes a lot of the picture motives. Having fixed what she finds on her leisurely patrol in her scetch book, at home she starts to assemble images, shapes, objects, colours into her own world of images at the computer.  A most inventive artistic game of confusion has to be brought to a Molly Goldfarb reign in every of her works. The result is a joyful mix- up of known and unknown imagery that sets the stage to plunge our thoughts into an imaginary world. The artist herself is often surprised when the printed work appears as to how it works out in the end. As the painter puts the paint away to control the success of the painting, Molly is delighted whenever  a successful print comes out to reality. 

It is fascinating to observe that the digital print technique serves her purpuses and makes the pictures to become perfect. It strengthens the visual impression by a vivid and colourful surface and creates space and depth. For that Molly Goldfarb had to develop a digital method as a perfect means to translate and amplify marker drawings and express her love of vibrant colors and intricate line work: " I enjoy being able to work “small” when it comes to focusing on the details on my computer screen (as I do with the markers in my sketchbook), while also thinking big when it comes to the final scale and impact. It’s always exciting to see the bright, magnified visions fully come to life once they are transformed from the digital world into the physical “real” world, and to experience them in real tangible form."

This is Molly Goldfarb's second trip to Berlin and she is not only looking forward to coming here but she brings a new print of the Brandenburg gate. I am sure you all wil enjoy to be able to look at the Brandenburg Gate with Molly Goldfarb's eye. All in all we promise that the evening of the exhibition will be very special.