Andreas Hildebrandt
1973 born in Dresden (lives and works in Dresden)
1993-1999 Studies landscape architecture at the TU-Dresden
1997-2002 study of painting/graphic at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste at Dresden
2002-2004 further studies at prof. Ralf Kerbach on the HfBK
2005-2007 university teaching position at the HfBK for fundamentals of painting/graphic
2007 Marion Ermer Preis
2009 Arbeitsstipendium der Kulturstiftung des Freistaates Sachsen
Solo Exhibitions (selection):
2010 »Andreas Hildebrandt«, Städtische Galerie, Dresden, Germany
2008 »Heimat Schacht«, galerie baer, Dresden, Germany; »Speicher«, Marella gallery, Milano, Italy
2007 Marion-Ermer-Preis, Oktagon, Hochschule für Bildende Künste Dresden, Germany; »Schauplätze«, Galerie Lonnes, Bremen, Germany
2006 Art academy, Dresden, Germany
2005 Art academy, Dresden, Germany
2003 »Zeugen«, Staatsschauspiel, Dresden, Germany; »Schauplätze«, Kunstverein Trier, Galerie für Junge Kunst, Germany
Participations:
2010 »Alle gegen Kehrbach«, Galerie Zanderkasten, Dresden, Germany; »Fred Rapid Glassworks«, Zero Fold, Cologne, Germany/Autocenter, Berlin, Germany (C)
2009 »Epilog«, Staatsschauspielhaus Dresden, Galerie für Junge Kunst, Germany
2008 »remarks on color_part II_german tendencies«, Priska C. Juschka Fine Art, New York, USA; »Storage«, Marella Galerie, Milano Italy; »Frühjahrssalon«, geh8, Dresden, Germany; »Erwerbungen«, Städtische Galerie Dresden, Germany
2007 »house party!«, galerie baer, Dresden, Germany; »CO.OP#1« Präsentation Galerie Post, Germany
2006 »10 Jahre Sammlungen im Willy-Brand-Haus« Berlin, Germany; Art Academy, Galerie für Bildende Kunst, Dresden, Germany; »New talents« Vonderbank Galerie, Berlin, Germany
2005 Art Academy, Galerie für Bildende Kunst, Erlenbach, Switzerland
2004 »Blühende Landschaften« Festung Königstein, Magdalenenburg, Germany; »lichter« Atelier Großenhainer Str.9, Dresden, Germany; »14 Tage« Villa am Albertplatz, Dresden, Germany
“Seeing a thing can sometimes trigger the mind to make another thing.
In some instances the new work may include, as a kind of subject
matter, references to the thing that was seen. And, because works of
painting tend to share many aspects, working itself may initiate memories
of other works.” Jasper Johns 1
For Andreas Hildebrandt, engaging with his own paintings plays a major role in his work. In the studio, he is surrounded not only by the pictures he is currently working on, but also those he has already finished. His compositions of recent years show landscapes spread in a dynamic sweep against an abstract background. Rather than any central perspective, there are several horizons that do not add up to a unified whole.
The individual parts overlap in several layers, at times obscured, at times suppressed by a layer of transparent colour. This creates a complex sense of space, but one which never obeys the rules of perspective to achieve an illusion of classically separated pictorial depth. The division into fore-, mid- and background is radically negated by a refusal to arrange the constituent parts of the motif – abstract areas of colour as well as identifiable objects and figures – according to their relative sizes and positions within the pictorial space; instead, the main criteria are rhythm and dynamism.
Echo (2006/07) is a striking example of the way Hildebrandt combines
landscape, human figures, architectural elements, geometrical shapes
and purely painterly marks. His landscapes are always marked by human interventions, a cultivated landscape with signs of use and habitation. Any rendering in language or narration of the visual content is prevented by blatant evidence of the act of painting that refers the picture back to its factual components: course brushstrokes, splashed and dripped paint. These traces bind the individual fragments of recognisable material together into an abstract composition, as in Abraum (Spoil, 2007) or Spiegelwand (Mirror Wall, 2006). This emphasis on the physical aspect of painting has a distancing function that frees the subject from being reduced to a pictorial theme. Colour is used in very different ways: as a clearly outlined form or in the formlessness of brushstrokes and blobs; applied in opaque or translucent layers; forming portrayals of specific objects, of geometrical patterns, of mutable or immaterial things.
Hildebrandt underlines the texture of the paint, his brush style is richly
varied and does not serve as a tool to represent the motif – painting is a representation of itself, it confronts the motif, surrounds it and charges it with tension. The picture takes its meaning not from the sources on which it is based, but from the material that constitutes it and from the act of rendering visible via the means of painting. In spite of this emphasis on the painterly, Hildebrandt draws inspiration from visual experiences in the city and above all in the countryside – although specific, identifiable topographies are not featured. Also, rather than using a camera as aide mémoire, he captures what he sees in sketches, already subjecting it to a process of artistic transformation. He honed his eye for constructive details while studying landscape architecture. This discipline combines aesthetic-artistic aspects with a technical-natural science basis. Its elements include plants, surfacing, hedges, walls and furniture. Because they employ vegetation, landscaped spaces are never “complete”, their development never finished. Hildebrandt treats his landscapes, too, as something unfinished,
fundamentally open, because they do not fit into the strict regime of
perspective and are composed using a number of elements that could
potentially be added to or reduced. In 2005, Andreas Hildebrandt introduced walls as a dominant motif in his painting. In Mauerstück (Wall Piece) he paints a brick wall that is supplemented by an abstracted but recognizable piece of woodland. Its monochrome grey contrasts with the rich nuances of colour in the reddish-brown wall. This is an early indication of the tendency within his oeuvre to force spatiality out of the picture. The area depicting the wall resists spatial localisation, its surface thus identical with the picture substrate, the canvas. His painting Rossendorf (2006) contains a variant of this idea. Instead of the closed surface of a brick wall, Hildebrandt paints a network of red lines in front of a group of trees in silhouette. The lines mark a foreground, a spatial moment, if they are interpreted as a fence, or a superposition, emphasising the two-dimensional surface, if read as purely abstract lines. What, the picture seems to ask, is actually real in painting?
One simple answer would be: the organisation of colour and form.
In a broader sense, this question occupies Hildebrandt in his paintings
Front, Bogen and Speicher (Front, Arc, Storage, all 2007). These works all use a trick: in front of a sometimes undefined, sometimes tiled-looking ground, on a large canvas, he paints a number of unevenly
spaced small pictures. They are based on small-format paintings
of his own, showing individual motifs from his landscapes, the
silhouette of a tree, a group of people, as well as mainly abstract and
geometrical figurations. Although Andreas Hildebrandt’s oeuvre is still
young, these ensembles already display a history of his work and give
a retrospective of his output to date. As illustrated by the quote above, the American painter Jasper Johns used motifs that were inspired by works of other artists. In dialogue with art history, he used various sources that appear in his pictures as names, initials, titles, imprints, copies and outline drawings.2 In vari ations, he plays through this vocabulary of borrowed motifs in his pictures over and over. Since In the Studio (1982), Johns has been interested in fictitious picture-within-a-picture motifs. Using illusionist techniques and assemblage, he painted the wall of a studio to which trompe-l’œil pictures and three-dimensional objects are attached. To demonstrate the difference between real object and depiction, he shows two of his own works in double, in a different state each time. An abstract picture, “fixed” to the wall with painted nails, is confronted with a copy of itself, but one in which its colours have all run. And the painted cast of his arm is juxtaposed with a drawing of this object. In art-historical terms, depicting a picture within a picture is based on the tradition of trompe-l’œil painting. Exploiting the effect of surprise, this technique was used to persuade the viewer of the reality of what was portrayed. Artists working in this genre usually present objects that are either flat or represented as if they extend outwards in relief, hanging on frames, walls or cupboard doors. The illusory power of painting is exploited not only to demonstrate the artist’s skill in transferring something that exists in three dimensions into a deceptively real-looking two-dimensional representation, but also, going beyond this illustrative function, to point to painting as such, a play between reality and illusion. In Front, Bogen and Speicher, this play takes place less on the level of a true-to-life copy of reality than in the demonstration of what painting is able to show. Andreas Hildebrandt deliberately integrates the act of painting into the surface of the picture by wiping the leftover
paint from the brush not on a rag but on the canvas. Moreover, the
picture-within-a-picture technique frees him from the need to invent
new motifs. Instead he can concentrate on creating a visual reality that
emphasises qualities of painterly expression.
Constanze von Marlin
1 Jasper Johns, quoted in: Richard Francis, Jasper Johns, New York 1984, p. 98.
2 On the private and cultural associations of the art-historical references in the work
of Jasper Johns, see Roberta Bernstein’s essay “Seeing a Thing Can Sometimes Trigger
the Mind to Make Another Thing”, in: Jasper Johns: A Retrospective (exhibition catalogue),
The Museum of Modern Art, New York 1996.