We are pleased to invite you to the second exhibition of works by Gregor Hildebrandt at Galerie Jan Wentrup.
Since his first exhibition two years ago, Hildebrandt’s work, which extends from canvases through paper compositions to capacious installations, has found considerable attention. In parallel with the exhibition in our gallery, a Gregor Hildebrandt solo exhibition will take place at Kunstverein Ludwigshafen from March 16 to April 29. The artist will also feature in a group exhibition in Galerie Almine Rech in Paris, followed by a solo exhibition in September.
Hildebrandt’s art is defined by the use of cassette and video tape. He is not interested merely in the specific texture of this material, but in the nature of the cassette tape as a storage medium. Before it is used, content is recorded on the tape in the form of different musical compositions, which are occasionally discernible in motif fragments in the artist’s work, but are never illustrated and remain abstract. With this procedure, Hildebrandt addresses art’s fundamental questions about authenticity. Viewers are not confined to mere perception, but invited to reflect the open form according to their own conceptualisations. Music and text as the hidden inner sound of Hildebrandt’s art form the expanded image space of this aesthetic experience.
If the contemplation of his art incorporates the heterogeneous cosmos of Gregor Hildebrandt’s references to music, film, literature and, last but not least, art history, his works turn out to be complex montages, in which pictorial associations from different spheres combine and interpenetrate.
Hildebrandt employs the material of his every-day environment without aesthetic or theoretical inhibition. Not only the cassette tape acquires a nostalgic character in our digitalised era. The same applies to the references to songs by groups and singers such as Sonic Youth, The Cure And Nick Cave, as well as Hildegard Knef, Jaques Brel and Ingrid Caven, while the use of film stills from classics like La Dolce Vita, Bonjour Tristesse, The Fabulous Baker Boys and Les Choses de la Vie in Hildebrandt’s paper compositions is characterised by romantic motifs of evanescence and transience. Hildebrandt distils the poetic moments from the products of commercial culture industry and concentrates them in the process of artistic creation, by which the identity of artist and spectator are opened up for exploration.
