Thanks to the recession, most of us are now pretty accustomed to anxiety, confusion and desperate re-evaluation of our actual relationship with reality. Which is why the gallows’ humor-laced surreality typified by David Lynch seems such a sensible form of fantasy to indulge in. Though Berliners’ already gritty sensibility means that the economy presages less jarring lifestyle changes for the locals, the ‘poor but sexy’ city is now the location for a series of exhibitions purveying lavish doses of surrealism.

Thus, Lynchmob, a show of more than thirty artists organized by ex-pat impresarios of frugal but fertile art cool, Emilie Trice and Christopher David, in .HBC, Berlin’s 1,800 square meter former Hungarian cultural centre turned gallery. Along with work punctuating recessionary realism with Lynchian touches are Maxime Ballesteros’s photographs featuring his seductively feral friends wallowing in the high-gloss, but low-cost romantic chaos of ‘Wild at Heart,’ Sergio Roger’s homemade hunters’ trophies from fabric scraps, and David Nicholson’s massive “Melancholia (Suellen)” oil painting.

The dark yet opulent larger than life-sized portrait of Nicholson’s dog Hank and his then-wife modeling as if she were Marie Antoinette styled by David LaChapelle is anchored into reality by a pile of the couple’s bills stacked under a gaudy night-table and grounded by a big rock. “I felt like I was under that rock when I painted it,” the Canadian-born and Berlin-based artist explains. “So, when the bills kept coming and there was nothing I could do with them, I figured I would just put them in the painting. And I was most careful to render the logos of creditors I hated the most,” he says. Revenge never felt so artistic.

Katrin, à moitier nue by Maxime Ballesteros (2009

Katrin, contre le mur by Maxime Ballesteros (2009)

David Nicholson, Melancholia (Suellen) 2006-2007 Oil on canvas 207 x
137 cm 81.5 x 53.9 inches Courtesy of the The Sander Collection and
Aeroplastics Contemporary, Brussels Belgium