ART CITIES:Paris-Gregor Hildebrandt
Gregor Hildebrandt is the 2016 recipient of The Falkenrot Prize, he began making collages with cassette tapes in the late ‘90s, when the mixtape was a genre in its own right. In 2003, he began experimenting with vinyl multimedia. The resurging ‘hipness’ of record players shortly after was a coincidence he welcomes. Hildebrandt doesn’t dictate nostalgic moments, he explains, simply creating the opportunities for them. “It’s up to the people (what they feel) I only propose an idea,’ be it a wow, flutter– or some other mystery”.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Almine Rech Gallery Archive
In “Alle Schläge sind erlaubt” his solo exhibition at Almine Rech Gallery in Paris, Gregor Hildebrandt, on entering the labyrinthine arrangement of opaque sound barriers “Schallmauern” (2013) and diaphanous columnar screens of vinyl records of “Schallplatten Säulenwand” (2010), the viewer leaves familiar structures behind and moves step by step through a many-layered world that has evolved with Hildebrandt over the years on the basis of audiovisual mediums. The work “Tous les coups sont permis” (2016) that gives the title to the exhibition refers to the ornamental wall covering of the captain’s room at the historic Jane Hotel in New York, where surviving passengers of the Titanic were temporarily housed. Here the artist has created a peacock feather pattern in fine dust and dirt on a seemingly transparent, off white monochrome surface. The site-specific installation “Hirnholzparkett” (2015) is made from the thin edges of cassette tape ribbons. Hildebrandt has wound them onto spools, cut them into orthogonal pieces and cast them in epoxy resin to be laid as flooring. The otherwise continual flow of these virtually endless tracks (which recall the grooves of a record or the annual rings of a tree) has been interrupted by the working process and turned into labyrinthine concatenations. The work interfaces with the architectonic structure of the exhibition like a tranquil lily pond in a Japanese garden, where a pond always symbolises the sea and where a crooked path, like a labyrinth, stands for life’s unpredictability and non-linearity. The black video tapes of the wall installation “Orphische Schatten” 2013) have all been populated with Jean Cocteau’s “Orpheus” (1949), a film that features shadows as some of its major motifs. The four empty niches also act as shadows, they suggest absent artworks through the apparent echoing of their mere external forms. For “Schachbrettboden” (2016) Hildebrandt has combined chess boards from a wide range of times and places. Despite their disparate origins they all seem to fit together perfectly and merge into a single entity. The luminescent shades of turquoise and blue in “Die immer wiederkehrende Blaue Stunde” (2016) refer to the title of Gottfried Benn’s poem “Blaue Stunde”. The coloured leaders on an audio cassette tape differ from the dark tape itself in that they are neither coated nor populated, but entirely blank. They are located where one side ends and the other begins.
Info: Almine Rech Gallery, 64 Rue de Turenne, Paris, Duration: 12/1-25/2/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.alminerech.com
