David Medalla, “Self Portrait,” 1998

As a self-proclaimed “transcendent-hedonist artist,” David Medalla (1942–2020) once made the following remark to painter and curator Gavin Jantjes:

This handwritten statement was among the archival documents that formed part of the ­artist’s posthumous mini-retrospective in Berlin, organized by Mountains in collaboration with Medalla’s partner, Adam Nankervis. A simple A4 sheet of paper, it could easily have gone unnoticed – as an accessory to the paintings, sculptures, textile, works on paper, and neon pieces that were the stars of the show. Yet, it is highly indicative of Medalla’s approach to art-making, one that camouflaged itself behind a knowing quasi-naivete and a world outlook that depended on fostering relationships far and wide, across ­far-flung geographical locations, historical periods, artistic -isms, and social contexts.

For Medalla, if there was only one thing that art could do, it was to have the capacity to survive all hardships, to be a beacon of hope. Perhaps this is one of the reasonings behind the decision to name the exhibition “Luftbrücke” (Air bridge, or Airlift) – a direct quotation taken from one of the four paintings (Self Portrait, 1998) that have been chosen as the conceptual anchor of the full presentation – and in itself a direct reference to the early stages of the Cold War and the ensuing Berlin Blockade of 1948–49, which ended in part thanks to the continued success of the Berlin Airlift operated by the Western Allies. Medalla, by placing himself in the center of the composition – an airplane taking off diagonally on the right, its upward mission mirrored by the flight of a butterfly on the left – offers the same direction for (his) art: to go above and beyond.

Considering that the artist’s archives are held in Berlin, one of the places in which he spent a portion of his life – along with Manila, London, Paris, and New York – it is surprising that “­Luftbrücke” is the first show to be dedicated to his work in the city. Medalla first lived in Berlin from 1997 to 1998, through a DAAD residency where he participated in the group exhibition “Art Lifts Berlin” held at the daadgalerie and curated by Friedrich Meschede. The four aforementioned paintings, originally made for that exhibition and not shown since then, are interconnected portraits of Medalla, Nankervis, the Catalan poet Jaime Gil de Biedma, who was an early patron of Medalla’s art in late 1950s Manila, and Maria von Maltzan, a German aristocrat, veterinarian, and member of the Resistance during World War II, whom Medalla met while staying at Tuntenhaus, a queer anarchist collective in Berlin.

“David Medalla: Luftbrücke,” Mountains (Alte Apotheke), Berlin, 2025

Taken together, these works tether Medalla’s biography to the city’s history and to his experiences, friendships, travels, and artistic journey. They acquiesce wholeheartedly to art critic, writer, and curator Guy Brett’s description, made a few years before the DAAD residency and ensuing exhibition, of Medalla’s second major round of painting – begun in the mid-1980s and to which these pieces retrospectively belong – as being “out on a limb of their own, with a quality of their own: sincere, tender, poetic, awkward yet graceful, autobiographical, richly worked, unfinished.” [2] They are painted with garishly bright blocks of color and flat planes; omitting all notions of perspective, they read like montages. Or, in other words, they remain loyal to ­Medalla’s idea of “synoptic realism,” a concept that “­collapsed time and space and brought together personal acquaintances, historical characters, different cultures, and various geographies in order to articulate a multisensorial approach to the trivial but meaningful events that constitute everyday life.” [3] Looking at Medalla’s Self ­Portrait from 1998, not only does a stylistic change become evident when compared to two earlier self-portraits (from 1962 and 1975) made with watercolor and pen on paper, but also the more overt decision to self-fashion and historicize. The slogan “Luftbrücke Berlin 1948” is intended as a commemoration and celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Allied operation, yet when viewed against the backdrop of today’s ­geopolitical shitshow, it’s an uncomfortable reminder of the uneasy parallels that can be drawn between the past and the present. Alliances have changed; wars have shifted geographies, but despite our best wishes, they continue to be waged.

Medalla’s exhibition was held both in Mountains’ premises at Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz and, as a temporary pop-up during Berlin Gallery Weekend, at a nearby space that had recently been vacated by a pharmacy, and which for the purposes of this show was christened “Alte Apotheke.” After the Gallery Weekend, a small selection of works, such as one of Medalla’s kinetic Sand Machine sculptures (1963/2017), migrated from the makeshift environment at the Alte Apotheke to the main gallery for the remainder of the exhibition. This shape-shifting approach to the exhibition itself is much in keeping with the fluidity and porosity of Medalla’s outlook on art and life.

“David Medalla: Luftbrücke,” Mountains, Berlin, 2025

Speaking of Medalla’s mental world, where hard-ons are never too far away from more intellectual or spiritual pursuits, the hedonist part of the artist’s self-identification cannot be left unmentioned. After all, his is a phallic universe. In the painting Homage to Maruska: Maria Gräfin von Maltzan (1998), a monkey – often appearing in Medalla’s works as a stand-in for the artist, a willful play on Medalla’s own foreignness and marginality (in multiple senses) – stands atop a table, his fire-truck-red erection in stark contrast to the black of his body. He holds a match to light ­Maltzan’s cigarillo as she, with her free hand, signs her name beneath the title page of the memoirs Schlage die Trommel und fürchte Dich nicht (Beat the drum and do not fear), which brought her fame after they were published in 1986. The paper’s edge brushes against the monkey-artist’s feet, and so, the circle is complete. Among the Winterlichter in Berlin (2009) series of acrylic on paper, no. 4 continues this humorously erotic theme. A monkey stares out at us, holding a copy of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason in its hands, and the faint shadow of an erection can just be made out through its underwear. Getting hot from reading Kant – Why not? In any case, the work is a perfect specimen of language, poetry, and philosophy meeting sexuality and carnal pleasures on equal terms.

Interspersed among these later paintings were some of Medalla’s most signature pieces that, rather than attempting to summarize his sprawling art-making, emphasized instead the impossibility of pinning down an artist whose never-ending process always depended on making connections between people, places, times, and civic movements, and resulted in an oeuvre that continues to refuse categorization. Perhaps Cloud Gate (1964/2017) – the slowly growing ­mountain of foam barely perceptibly and yet always shape-shifting, its form transforming with external conditions such as the place where it is displayed (indoors versus outdoors) and even the ­presence (or not) of people – remains one of the best markers of Medalla’s practice. It is at once of and in transit. It is just like A Stitch in Time (1981), a participatory textile work that exists in multiple versions (the one showed at Mountains dates from the South Hill Park Performance Festival in Bracknell, UK), but which was born in 1968 when Medalla handed two of his former lovers a handkerchief each, embroidered with messages and accompanied by a needle and thread, encouraging them to sew as a way to pass time while traveling.

Years later, Medalla recognized one of the handkerchiefs on a stranger’s backpack at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport. Love, travel, chance, and the giving up of authorial authority for something more communal, dispersed, and free: Medalla is no longer with us in body, but these are some of the gifts that his art continues to offer. If connectivity is one of the prime aspects of his practice, one that runs through it like a thread, it is due to his unwavering belief in the need and power of cooperation, compassion, and friendship – qualities that are perhaps needed more than ever, at a time when connections, alliances, and relationships are breaking down left and right, when friend and foe sometimes appear as interchangeable sides of the same coin.

“David Medalla: Luftbrücke,” Mountains Berlin, April 30–June 21, 2025.

Anya Harrison is a curator and writer based in Montpellier and Paris. Since 2019, she has been a curator at MO.CO. Montpellier Contemporain.

Image credits: 1–3. Courtesy another vacant space and Mountains, photos Julie Becquart