NORMAL PEOPLE at Berlin Gallery Weekend

The best works were dark, too, but undefeated. At Galerie Buchholz, Trisha Donnelly took the prize with double-exposed photographs of forests and clouds that were turned on their sides to look like ex-rays or Rorschachs, at once impenetrable and uncannily familiar. Donnelly’s way of constructing through obfuscation spoke to another favorite of the week, on view in the Stoschek collection's new display: Mary Lucier’s Bird’s Eye, a 1978 video that shows a laser beaming directly into the camera, burning up its internal vidicon tube over the course of ten minutes. At a moment when most are busy making their own center hold, Lucier’s elegant consideration of destruction’s crucial role in creativity felt urgent. At New Toni in Prenzlauer Berg, Vera Palme’s dense and eclectic paintings lined the walls like a difficult sentence, providing another rare example of art that takes a real and decisive step in terms of developing a language for itself—and of how small that step needs to be in order to matter.