We are pleased to announce the exhibition FÜR KOMMENDE MORGEN with Gregor Hildebrandt, which will open at the gallery on 7 October. This solo exhibition, Hildebrandt’s fourth at the gallery, makes above all an artistic statement. The spatial installation brings together two fields of Hildebrandt’s extensive oeuvre: painting and installation.
Gregor Hildebrandt’s material is the audiotape. For him, its fascination lies not just in the complexity of the content that is recorded on the tapes, but also in the visual aspects of the material. In the exhibition FÜR KOMMENDE MORGEN, the focus lies especially on the subjects of reference and reflection.
Hildebrandt reflects the work of other modern artists in his installations. The great complexity of this appropriation is typical for his art, as is his striving for the greatest formal clarity.
The moments of reflection are quite varied: not only is the beholder reflected in the black shiny tapes that are mounted on the canvas. The artist himself also used a mirroring as a model for the double portrait shown in the exhibition. The mirroring on the marble slate, which in formal terms takes up the striated and painterly structure of the canvas, shows the artist together with his girlfriend. But only the reflections in the stone of the marble slate were photographed. All the fragments of the installation contain references to very personal moments and places that are especially important to the artist and that are linked to a story.
For example, we see a column that can also be found in the artist’s favourite bar in Berlin. On one side Gregor Hildebrandt has attached various objects like postcards, invitations, or presents from friends that refer to the songs by Jaques Brel. The 100 most beautiful songs by Brel that deal with essential subjects like love and death, happiness and unhappiness, are recorded on this work, Hildebrandt’s largest canvas to date.
Gregor Hildebrandt’s fragment Ich erwarte den Herrn mit großer Geduld endlich hat er sich zu mir herabgelassen, installed on a wall, is originally from a club in Berlin the artist goes to frequently. In this way, Gregor Hildebrandt links rigorous formal structures to very personal motifs and references, thus creating rather subtly charged works. They don’t reveal themselves to the beholder at first sight; rather, the objects need to be approached slowly. Hildebrandt’s rigorous, sparse, and abstract formal vocabulary is contrasted with the colourful, personal, and quite concrete relicts from the artist’s life.
The pillar the artist moved into the gallery space divides the canvas and determines the beholders’ standpoint and perspective anew every time. It is impossible to grasp the picture in its entirety, because depending on the standpoint, our relationship to the division changes. The work has to be experience in movement. Hildebrandt makes reference to the work Ordine Geometric by Gerhard Merz. Like the artist Merz, Hildebrandt too strives for the highest degree of formal clarity in his works.
With their audiotapes mounted side by side, Hildebrandt’s works are reminiscent of minimal and conceptual art of the 1960s and 1970s. Minimal art saw itself as a counter movement to the gestural painting that dominated at the time, and there was also a strong preference for painting when Gregor Hildebrandt studied art in Mainz and Berlin. Given this background, it is easy to understand the artist’s path toward abstraction. Early on, Hildebrandt started making sketch and idea books for each of his works, where he documented his first audiotapes.
Gregor Hildebrandt’s works were shown most recently at Castello Rivara, Turin, Berlinische Galerie, and the Miami Art Museum. In 2012, he will exhibit at the Tel Aviv Art Museum and the Museum van Bommel van Dam in Venlo in the Netherlands. His works are part of the collections of the Centre Pompidou, Paris, Berlinische Galerie, and Sammlung zeitgenössische Kunst des Bundes, Germany.
