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Imagine a gallery that has closed, its windows whitewashed, the whole place empty except for some crates that presumably used to protect artworks. Galleries have an eeriness anyway, but that feeling is amplified when they’re empty. The gallery becomes generic again, ready to open up if a  new use can be found.

The Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin feels like that right now. Perhaps Mies van der Rohe’s most iconic project (if not his best), the building has profound symbolism for Berlin, built on  a site near the wall in former West Berlin’s Kultur forum. Today, the complex of late modernist landmarks sits somewhat uncomfortably in the shadow of the massive Potsdamer Platz/Leipziger Platz development. The older buildings suffer from mild neglect, with weeds growing  up the Richard Serra sculpture outside Hans Scharoun’s Philharmonie concert hall.

Imi Knoebel’s installation,  Zu Hilfe, zu Hilfe, is profoundly strange and defamiliarises a building that many will feel they know well. You stand inside Mies’ famous steel-table-on-a-plinth and expect to have the usual view of the city. Instead, the windows obscured, you find yourself contemplating the strange quality of light filtering through whitewashed windows, and the rudeness of that technique on a building that is the image of abstract perfection.

Three shades of whitewash on the windows lend Mies van der Rohe’s Neue Nationalgalerie an eerie beauty

The title (meaning ‘Help, help’) is taken from the first line of Mozart’s Magic Flute, cried by Tamino as he is pursued by a serpent, just before he passes out. But the work of Knoebel on Mies’ windows has a numbing, strangely comforting sensation. The three shades of whitewash flatten the usually dramatic light. You focus on what is close by, plus the silhouettes of people against the white windows. It is a quite unique experience of the building, a simple gesture that attains a referential complexity.

Behind the two pavilion-like cloakrooms of the gallery stand piles of strange plywood shapes, mostly Euclidean solids, which look like abstracted packaging, or objects gathered together  in readiness for removal men.

Knoebel currently has another show, of his abstract paintings, at the Deutsche Guggenheim. Give that one a miss and head for the Neue Nationalgalerie. You may know this building well, but I promise you, nothing can prepare you  for this subversive gesture of rude beauty.