Perrotin Seoul is pleased to present Kraniche Ziehen Vorüber (Cranes Passing By), a solo exhibition by Berlin-based artist Gregor Hildebrandt. Returning eight years after his first solo exhibition in Korea at the gallery in 2016, the show will present the artist's recent works, including his signature series of colourful vinyl columns, as well as his use of analog music storage media like cassette tapes. Hildebrandt's evolving practice, which has drawn from rich cultural references, including music, literature, and film, will be presented through the analog nature of the materials, triggering our memories and nostalgia, offering viewers a synaesthetic experience.

Every morning, the artist is greeted by cranes flying overhead in the ceiling painting of his Berlin bedroom. Cranes never linger, they stay on the move; their flight determined by their constant migration from summer to winter habitats and back. The exhibition's title refers to a 1957 film by Russian director Mikhail Kalatosov, The Cranes Are Flying, which begins in the early morning and shows an exuberant young couple in love dancing through the deserted streets of Moscow. They pause briefly to watch cranes migrating in the sky, at which point they are surprised by a street-cleaning vehicle and sprayed with water. But that doesn't dampen the lovers' spirits.

Gregor Hildebrandt is a lover. He loves life, art, film and music, and he generously shares this love with the world through his art. It would be an understatement to say that music runs through his artistic oeuvre; indeed, the artist not only creates his work from sound carriers—tapes and records—but he also plays with all the registers of music in his art, with tempo, rhythm, emphasis, pauses, repetitions and cadences. And with melodies, remembered a million times over, but which never fully emerge as such in his work. He is also a supporter of musical talent and releases meticulously produced vinyl albums by selected artist-musicians on his own label.

The essential difference between a painting and a piece of music is that the piece of music unfolds in time. It requires the audience to listen, to follow it closely in order to understand it. This takes a certain amount of time that cannot be regained, but offers an experience that cannot be undone. The work of art cannot be unseen either, but it presents itself in its entirety to the eyes of the viewer, the linearity of viewing is reserved for the gaze of the individual viewer, so each pictorial narrative unfolds individually.

Free-standing columns of colourful painted vinyl records, shaped into bowls and stacked on top of each other, pay homage to the great classic of modern sculpture, Constantin Brancusi's Endless Column. The records' colours mimic the striped pattern of Gregor Hildebrandt's partner's mother's sweater, thus taking up private, almost intimate motifs. At a time when it seems commonplace that music, in the form of digital files, has evaporated into the ubiquitous 'cloud', records, video and audio tapes are often seen as obsolete storage media. But in Hildebrandt's artworks, it is precisely these media that enable the abstract pieces of music to acquire a body, to remain tangible; they represent a direct link to the musical work and the performers—as well as the legends and myths associated with them. As analog objects, they are direct impressions of events, of transmitted acoustic vibrations, which, precisely because they remain silent, open up a space for the viewer's imagination, for subjective associations, thus forming a resonance space for a kind of inner listening.

Gregor Hildebrandt's process for creating his works actually produces two images, similar to analog photography: a positive and a negative. Sound or video tapes mounted on canvases are further processed by the artist using acrylic paint, often with gestural markings reminiscent of abstract expressionist artists. The tapes are then peeled off again and, depending on how the canvas has been prepared, the magnetic layer may or may not stick to the canvas. The removed tapes themselves form a kind of negative of the first picture and are mounted on a second canvas, forming the complementary counterpart to the first picture, both carrying the same music and signs, only inverted, like flickering mirror images or echoes of barely remembered dreams.

The interplay between negative and positive is itself the subject of two new works, which consist of cassette tape racks—the paper inserted into the sleeves forming the motifs. Donna (2024) depicts the actress Natalie Portman wearing make-up for her role in Darren Aronofsky's 2010 film Black Swan. It shows the path of an ambitious dancer in her self-destructive struggle to claim the antagonistic roles of the black and white swans in Piotr Tchaikovsky's ballet Swan Lake, which dramatically escalates in hallucinatory episodes until the cadence, which deals with artistic perfection and self-destruction. In the ink jet print of the actress's portrait there is a hole torn by the artist, like a large tear, through which the original titles on the cassette sleeves reveal themselves. There, the name of pop diva Madonna stands out, introducing another layer of pop-cultural references, an intensification and distillation of the portrayal of the obsessive artist.

Umatmen erwünschte Lüfte dir die beruhigte Flut (2024, in awkward approximation by the author, and only for the purpose of this text: breathe in the desired air on the calm tide) is a nearly untranslatable line from the 1801 hymn dedicated to divinity in nature and the glories of ancient Greece, Der Archipelagus, by Friedrich Hölderlin. It was written in what is now Bad Homburg, Hildebrandt's birthplace, and begins with the motif of returning cranes. Hildebrandt's work bearing this title takes the subject of white and black swans and in turn depicts two swans facing each other, inspired by Swedish painter Hilma af Klint's most famous painting: The Swan, Group IX/SUW, No. 1 (1915), showing a white swan on a black background and a black swan on a white background, their beaks and the tips of their wings touching. For Hilma af Klint, the swans symbolised the overcoming of a world that was deeply polarised along dualities such as good and evil, day and night, man and woman. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the artist experienced a creative phase lasting several years, during which she perceived her hand as being guided by a higher power while painting, thereby revealing an otherwise hidden perspective on the world of cosmic unification.

Gregor Hildebrandt's version turns the motif from Klint's painting on its head, her white swan is black in his painting and vice versa, but the fundamental change hardly alters the overall impression and thus emphasises Klint's point. A significant difference in motif, however, lies in the fact that the artist poetically concretizes the cosmic union. The swans were not placed over the existing inlays of the cassettes, as in the case of Donna, but were cut out directly from black and white inlays. The information on the backs of the cassettes thus remains partially visible,—in what at first glance seems like an arbitrary arrangement of titles and artist, resulting in a kind of meta-poem, full of emotional confusion, dream images and chimeras, memories and fantasies. Where the beaks of the two swans meet, on the back of a cassette, there is only a single word: lover.

Andreas Schlaegel (writer, artist)

Press release courtesy Perrotin