BBA Gallery is delighted to present ‘Berlin, A Rough Cut’, a comprehensive solo exhibition by artist duo Maria and Natalia Petschatnikov. The twin sisters, who live and work in Berlin-Mitte/Kreuzberg, transform the gallery into a walk-through storyboard of their everyday urban lives, exploring the boundaries between painting, installation, and field research.

About the Artists

Maria and Natalia Petschatnikov can look back on a distinguished education, including Hunter College in New York, the Rhode Island School of Design, and the prestigious studio of Annette Messager at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. For over 15 years, Berlin has been the centre of their lives. In their work, they focus on seemingly insignificant everyday phenomena. With wit and a profound gift for observation, they succeed in extracting an extraordinary and often surreal perspective from the ordinary.

The Exhibition: A Film Made Of Fragments

For the presentation at the BBA Gallery, the artists have chosen a cinematic approach: they conceive of the exhibition as a film composed of several scenes—shot at different times and in various locations, yet forming a single narrative. Individual works and small series of paintings and sculptures are juxtaposed to create a complex, non-linear story, in which fragments gain meaning through rhythm and proximity.

Insight Into The Featured Artworks

In ‘Berlin, A Rough Cut’, the everyday is poetically dissected:

• Urban Finds: Large-scale paintings of objects abandoned at the roadside, such as sofas or mattresses, become portraits of change and lived history.
• Time Loops: In series such as the ‘Calendar Pages’ (dated 2032), the future is staged as an already-past product. The present is treated as if it were already a memory—like a film still captured just before it vanishes.
• Material and Illusion: Sculptures made of ‘liquid wood’ and epoxy resin create a deceptive imitation of precious porcelain, while papier-mâché pigeons bring the Berlin asphalt directly into the gallery space.
• Subversion within the System: Drawings of official government envelopes and banknotes (oil on vellum) use subtle humour to examine the tension between the individual and social control.

Anthropologists of Everyday Life in Berlin

The artists view themselves as anthropologists; their works emerge from ongoing field research within urban spaces. Berlin plays a central role in this. The city is in a state of permanent flux, and the district around Heinrich-Heine-Straße—home to both their studio and the BBA Gallery—embodies this process in its most concentrated form. Defined by historical layers and urban ruptures, it is a place where different planes of time coexist.

Philosophy of Imperfection

‘Berlin, A Rough Cut’ is an homage to the imperfect. Whether it is the ‘damaged leaves’ in which the twins find the true beauty of life, or the shadows of flowers that linger in the image long after the plants have withered—the Petschatnikovs capture the moment before or the moment after. Their art is an invitation to see the world through the eyes of two observers who make the useless meaningful and the invisible present.

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