HELL GETTE

The exhibition title “CTRL3R” is the combination of the computer command key “ctrl” and “controller” as in gaming tool. As viewers progress from one painting to another, Gette’s series of works becomes a “video game” on canvas. The story grandiosely commences with scenes of a dragon, a valley, and palm trees. The progression of the narrative is guided by emojis hidden in the paintings, such as mushrooms, flexed arms, swords, coins, and more. The climax features a showdown between three goddesses: a genie, an artist and a fairy who successfully vanquish the dragon, drawing parallels to a modern interpretation of Artemisia Gentileschi’s “Judith Slaying Holofernes.” Just like the powerful women depicted in Gentileschi’s painting, the female characters in Hell Gette’s works also express such fearless determination: the artist boldly raises her powerful arms, holding a palette, while the fairy hovers in mid-air, setting money ablaze.

In addition to the narrative content, Gette’s creative process also reflects a new digital vocabulary of her generation. Her works, whether in her 2020 solo exhibition at Annka Kultys Gallery in London or the two solo exhibitions in museums such as at Kebbel Villa Muesum or Museum Galerie der Stadt Sindelfingen, are tightly connected to digital art institutions. Many of Gette’s works blur the boundary between the digital realm and the reality, showcasing a diverse and innovative collage-like texture.

Layering on the blurred surface with diverse and unique textual collages, Hell Gette creates a polycentric visual field that is continuously shifting. The pictorial surface comes from the “smudge” function in Photoshop, highlighting and blurring those emojis. This technique not only provides viewers with visual stimulation and surprises but also becomes the oil paintbrush in a digital form, shrewdly blending the virtual and the real into Gette’s works. It also demonstrates the artist’s journey in mastering digital media and concepts, gradually forming a tangible landscape that transcends the real world and abstract painting.

Hell Gette also creates a visual space tightly connected to the art history, especially in the German painting context. She inherits the taste for “bad painting” from artists like Martin Kippenberger, Albert Oehlen, and Werner Büttner, implementing the elements of roughness, humor, and coarse outlines deliberately preserved while digitizing from watercolor drafts. Through seemingly rapid, gradient, and dynamic entry points, Gette offers and demands more extended observation and contemplation from the audience. While her artistic practice and connection to digital tools are widely known, starting this year, she has incorporated bold oil strokes and large areas of organic color field, pushing Gette’s “Landscape 3.0” to the edge of painterliness. The result is a new subjectivity that combines the meaning of the latter with the visual of the former. Through this process, the artist has found a way to eliminate the boundaries between the figurative and the abstract, the virtual and the real.