Art Cologne 2018
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ART COLOGNE is an art fair for international art galleries presenting art of the 20th and 21st centuries in Cologne, Germany. It is the oldest fair of its kind having started with just 18 galleries in 1967. Today around 200 commercial galleries come together each spring to present works by over 2.000 artists, covering all price segments from well-known blue-chip artists to the newest young and emerging artists.
WENTRUP gallery and Galerie Klueser will be presenting the work of german artist Gregor Hildebrandt made of cassette tape and compression-molded records.
On the cassette tape Gregor used for the „Well you’re my friend (Bonnie Prince Billy)“ work the song "I See A Darkness“ from Bonnie Prince Billy is recorded. This works is very special as the cassette tape is woven.
About the artist
Gregor Hildebrandt makes great use of pre-recorded cassette tapes as material in his pictures and installations. The tapes are applied directly onto canvases and photographic prints and in room-sized installations. Although Hildebrandt’s work makes formal reference to Minimalism, the addition of a great number of subjective and autobiographical citations actually deliberately repudiates this strategy.
For Hildebrandt, the cassette tape as artistic medium, especially in its original function of storage medium, fulfils an important function: it enables the artist to add a further “invisible” dimension to his pictures. Playing with perception in this way is a major characteristic of his work; the picture is completed in the head of the viewer.
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 and playfully links aspects of conceptual art and minimal art with his personal life and experience of pop culture.
