Berlin Art Complex Rises From a Brewery’s Ruins

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In this city’s not-quite-yet-hip Neukölln district, the Kindl Center for Contemporary Art is taking shape in a vast abandoned brewery thanks to the vision of two art collectors — and an artist and his nose-diving airplane.

The Kindl, named after the popular beer that was brewed at the facility for 70 years before the company relocated to a larger space outside the city, is the brainchild of the Swiss art collecting couple Burkhard Varnholt, a banker, and Salome Grisard, an architect.

The facility was built in the late 1920s in the German Expressionist style. Its red-brick facade and imposing main tower evoke the Tate Modern in London — both in its physical aspect and as an example of how a transformed industrial space can slowly help revive a neighborhood.

The art complex, which covers 5,500 square meters, or 59,000 square feet, will open fully next summer at a cost of 6 million euros, or $7.7 million, with two more exhibition areas, several artists’ studios and a cafe in the large space amid six enormous dormant brewing coppers. It will be devoted entirely to new art and will not feature the private collection of Mr. Varnholt and Ms. Grisard, who live in Zurich. They are funding the entire project aside from revenue generated from admissions and occasional space rentals for special events.

Judging by a recent visit during the fourth annual Berlin Art Week, a citywide celebration of the city’s burgeoning arts scene in different galleries and repurposed venues, the Neukölln neighborhood, which lies in an industrial area of the former American sector of East Berlin, is off the beaten path of the city’s hipper gallery areas, which have attracted collectors from all over the world.

“Neukölln is more grass-roots than other, more artistically established neighborhoods in Berlin,” said Andreas Fiedler, the center’s Swiss-born curator. “But here are a lot of artist spaces and a lot of artists produce here.”

“The success of Berlin as a center for artists is because of who is here, who has been here, and the freedom that is based on the myth of the ‘90s,” he continued, referring to the decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall when the city exploded with art and refurbishment. “It’s still a very liberal city, and you can realize here what you can’t necessarily in other parts of Europe.”

That is evident in the main hall of the art center, the only room currently open to the public, where a two-seat yellow plane dangles from the 20-meter, or 65-foot, ceiling of the former boiler house of Kindl Beer.

The facility’s massive room helped to draw the installation that will anchor the new art center’s first phase. “Kitfox Experimental,” by the 76-year-old Swiss artist Roman Signer, who is known for his outrageous outdoor installations, is an assemble-yourself airplane (the popular Kitfox brand), with two large fans blowing from opposite walls to move the plane in a circular motion. It hangs upside down, spinning from the force of the fans, and their deafening sound adds to the almost movielike sense that the plane is spiraling toward earth.

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