Álvaro Urbano
September and the Lions
ChertLüdde, Berlin
2 May – 26 July 2025

ChertLüdde presents September and the Lions, a solo exhibition by Berlin-based artist Álvaro Urbano (1983, Madrid). Known for his immersive installations and sculptures that blur the boundaries between architecture, fiction, and memory, Urbano conjures a late-summer evening in Berlin’s Tiergarten—reimagined within the gallery walls.

After passing a flickering street lamp and a box cradling a bird’s nest, the scene shifts and an alternative environment begins to unfold, ripe for reimagining. Bathed in a suspended twilight, different trees emerge from the gallery walls, shaping a fragmented landscape poised on the edge of winter dormancy. Like a film set mid-scene, Urbano’s installation casts the gallery into a liminal pause.

Kept to their real scale and preserved in their late-summer state through hand painted metal, each sculpture represents plants that grow in the area surrounding the Löwenbrücke (Lions’ Bridge) in Tiergarten. Since the early post-war era of the 1950s, this area has been used as an active cruising site, a semi-public space for anonymous sexual encounters. Positioned at the edges of the bridge were once four antique lion sculptures that stood guard with their jaws clenched around the bridge’s suspension cables. Before they were removed in 2008 for restoration, they used to welcome the area’s regulars. Frequently, drag queens would paint their stone claws with bright nail polish, quietly asserting a sense of ownership in a space shaped by both visibility and concealment. The lions are now spectral absences, remaining visible only in Urbano’s posters plastered at the entrance of the gallery, as a memory fading away.

In crafting this elusive still life, Urbano engages intimately with the architecture of the space, drawing the visitor into an acute awareness of inhabiting a place that feels both forsaken and sacred. Rather than simulating an exterior world, the artist transforms the interior into a threshold between presence and absence. The remaining light comes from within the space, but shines through the windows. As the final golden flares of sunset pour through, the raindrops on the window glisten. It is a moment steeped in myth and wonder—a rare convergence of sun and rain. Some say it’s when witches make love, when nature reveals its strange, inexplicable magic.

By almost obsessively reproducing the fragile, transitory reality of Berlin’s Tiergarten, his exhibition, September and the Lions, alludes to the fallibility of our certainties and the deep human need to imagine alternative places and realities. Like a heterotopia, the exhibition reveals itself to be of a different nature than what the eye first perceives—layered, elusive, but not entirely within reach. It resonates with Italian poet and film director Pier Paolo Pasolini’s vision of rebirth through ruin: “from the world’s refuse, a new / world is born: new laws are born / where there is no more law, new honor / born where honor is dishonor . . .  / Powers and nobilities rise / from the piled-up shanties, / in the endless expanses where you think / the city ends, but where in fact it begins / all over again, inimical, begins a thousand / times over again, with bridges / and mazes, excavations and scaffolds / behind great waves of high-rises / that cover entire horizons.¹” This artificial tension between fiction and material reality, between the theatrical and the architectural, lies at the heart of Urbano’s practice—where spaces not only hold stories, but become characters themselves.

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Accompanying the exhibition is a text by curator and art critic Krist Gruijthuijsen, titled What remains.

Note:
1. Extract from Pier Paolo Pasolini – Sesso, consolazione della miseria!, 1961; La religione del mio tempo, 1961

What remains

Text by Krist Gruijthuijsen, Spring 2025

Fuck you! …is what entered my mind when I arrived at Tiergarten in March. Dusk had just started falling over Löwenbrücke (Lions’ Bridge) and it could have been the most idyllic scenery to write from, but—typical for Berlin—the bridge was under construction and has been for more than 10 years. I found a spot somewhere close to the construction site and began to settle in on the thought of spending the night there. It felt then as if I needed an existential experience—one that would inspire me to write something proper for Álvaro’s upcoming exhibition, which is based on this specific area, an infamous cruising place for the gay community in Berlin’s central park. It was early Spring, the blossom had yet to arrive, and I was probably going to freeze my ass off.

On my way over there, I had stopped at a bookstore to get one of those Moleskine notebooks to make myself look smart. I have never in my entire life used a diary or notebook, so I guess tonight would be the first. At Álvaro’s recommendation, I later stopped at the Gaslaternen-Freilichtmuseum, which used to be Europe’s largest outdoor gas lantern museum. According to the signage, it was founded in 1978, as gas lamps all over the city were being replaced by electric ones. With nearly 100 gas lamps—both originals and replicas—the museum boasts the largest collection of its kind in Europe. I’d read online that the condition of the exhibits deteriorated to such an extent that it was decided to discontinue the museum in its current form. Thus, I found myself entering a scenario that could have easily been created by Álvaro himself—a gloomy, liminal space populated by dysfunctional lanterns as protagonists. It reminded me of the movie Holy Motors by Leos Carax, which ends in a parking garage filled with limousines conversing with each other through their headlights—flickering out one by one. What remains is what I wrote on the first page of my sophisticated notebook. It was Álvaro’s original title for the show. We discussed how generic it sounded, after which he decided to change it to September and the Lions. But What remains kept buzzing in my head—not just because of this place I found myself in, but because of what was left of my memory of it.

I got up and made my way past the usual spots. I sat down on one of the benches close to the public toilet—one of the few still left in Berlin. It was the early 2000s when my ex brought me to Berlin to show me the city in all of its glory. We passed a sex bar where the bouncer demanded us to take our clothes off, toss them in a garbage bag, and then proceeded to write the number 88 across my chest with a black marker. What followed was a visit to said public toilet, which was packed with mostly older men. Through a self-made glory hole, one of the men called my name: 88.

In 2016, I visited an artist, who is primarily known for his large murals—one of which was on display at the entrance of Berghain for over a decade. However, his earlier work dealt a great deal with Berlin’s sexual politics and the HIV/AIDS crisis. In one of the rooms of his studio, I came across a series of benches that he produced. They were constructed from toilet doors that the artist had salvaged, when, back in the early 2000s, the city of Berlin decided to close their public bathrooms to curb sexual promiscuity and drug use. Glory holes, phone numbers, scribbles, political and sexually charged statements are plastered all over them—a raw document of their time. I asked if he had also taken the doors of the public bathroom that I had my own sexual encounter in. He said yes, after which I bought the piece.

I walk past the deserted ping-pong tables, which are normally heavily used for group activities during warm summer nights. What makes Berlin special? I remember the former state secretary for culture asking me this during one of my interviews for my former directorship. I replied: “The fact that I can take my clothes off and walk butt-naked in its central park”. He looked at me with a mix of disappointment and condescension as if he had just interviewed some wide-eyed tourist on the streets. Maybe he was right.

Nevertheless, throughout my tenure as director, I would cycle to Tiergarten straight after work to spend hours lying naked in the sun. No matter how uncool and cliché this made me seem. I craved that feeling of freedom nonetheless.

During the pandemic, I spent most of my late afternoons on the so-called Tuntenwiese and it was there that I discovered the writings of the French author and photographer Hervé Guibert. A pioneer of autofiction and fascinated by the possibilities of self-representation, Guibert’s experimental prose is shaped by violence and desire, absence and decay—his work contaminated by the words of Jean Genet and Thomas Bernhard, amongst others. Guibert used photography as a tool for embracing transience and language for creating fiction—fiction he performed and lived. “My body, due to the effects of lust or pain, has entered a state of theatricality, of climax, that I would like to reproduce in any matter possible: by photo, by video, by audio recording. It’s a laboratory that I offer up as a performance…”. He wrote this knowing his life was coming to an end, taken by HIV/AIDS. Guibert’s thoughts were about photography, particularly about the photographs that are not taken. He was interested in the psychology beyond the frame of an image—memory itself a form of photography.

The website of the Gaslaternen-Freilichtmuseum calls the gas lamps “silent witnesses” of Berlin’s past 150 years—a time of unprecedented turmoil. One could say the same about the various plants that have occupied the cruising area in Tiergarten since the reinstalment of the park after the Second World War. Like in many of Álvaro’s installations, these plants become anthropomorphic, symbolizing bodies that appear and dissolve.

I was glad to have witnessed Álvaro’s recent exhibition at SculptureCenter in New York, which made connections between the Central Park cruising area and a public artwork by the American sculptor Scott Burton (1939–1989). Originally installed in the lobby of the Equitable Center, a building in midtown Manhattan, in 1986, it was dismantled in 2020. The overall shape of the sculptural group was reminiscent of a clock frozen at 9 to 5, a reminder of the behavioral structure governing its corporate environment. Álvaro managed to trace the work, which has been in storage ever since, and had quite literally put it on display as a ruin in process—a gathering place that once was, made by an artist lost to HIV-related illness. Like leaves that change their color in the fall to eventually dissolve and disappear, bodies come and go. Environments change while memories fade.

When I strolled back to my spot at Löwenbrücke, I opened my phone and re-read the first part of the last text I wrote while still living in Berlin:

“At times, I stare at myself in the mirror until I reach the point where I become estranged from my own image. Where I move away from the identity I was born with and that I am judged by. I analyze my bone structure, my eyes, my hair and my posture. I objectify myself to such a degree that life disappears, and death comes to the surface. Throughout my life, I have stared at death on several occasions, and when I told my mother I was gay she replied ‘Please, don’t get sick.’”