Herbert Hinteregger has been using ball pen ink from standard Bic Crystal pens as colour in painting for years, raising questions about the present-day possibilities of painting, about transformation and revaluation, about reduction and deceleration. His paintings take an enormous amount of time to create, both as regards the extraction of the ink from the plastic tube inside the pen and its subsequent application in painting. For several years now, Hinteregger has increasingly incorporated his paintings in installation settings, thereby emphasizing their object character. At the same time, the wall as context of the picture is made to emerge from invisibility and lose its ostensibly neutral character.

In 2006, Hinteregger created a space whose walls and further boundary surfaces were completely scattered with Bic pens. Referencing Claes Oldenburg’s The Store, the work title all over—store emphasised the situation of a closed space that can be looked into from outside through the shop window. Also in all over—space detail, the installation he realized for the Kunsthalle Krems in 2016, Hinteregger appears to consider issues of time and material economy when he marks the exhibition space as negative, or potential space of painting by juxtaposing product content and container.

Text by Verena Gamper, Curator, Leopold Museum, Vienna. Courtesy Bernhard Knaus Fine Art.