GREGOR HILDEBRANDT

Every morning, the artist is greeted by cranes flying overhead in theceiling painting of his Berlin bedroom. Cranes never linger, they stayon the move; their flight determined by their constant migration fromsummer to winter habitats and back. The exhibition’s title refers to a1957 film by Russian director Mikhail Kalatosov, The Cranes AreFlying, which begins in the early morning and shows an exuberantyoung couple in love dancing through the deserted streets ofMoscow. They pause briefly to watch cranes migrating in the sky, atwhich point they are surprised by a street-cleaning vehicle andsprayed with water. But that doesn’t dampen the lovers’ spirits.

Gregor Hildebrandt is a lover. He loves life, art, film and music, and hegenerously shares this love with the world through his art. It would bean understatement to say that music runs through his artistic oeuvre;indeed, the artist not only creates his work from sound carriers—tapesand 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 neverfully emerge as such in his work. He is also a supporter of musicaltalent and releases meticulously produced vinyl albums by selectedartist-musicians on his own label.

The essential difference between a painting and a piece of music isthat the piece of music unfolds in time. It requires the audience tolisten, to follow it closely in order to understand it. This takes a certainamount of time that cannot be regained, but offers an experience thatcannot be undone. The work of art cannot be unseen either, but itpresents itself in its entirety to the eyes of the viewer, the linearity ofviewing is reserved for the gaze of the individual viewer, so eachpictorial narrative unfolds individually.

Free-standing columns of colourful painted vinyl records, shaped intobowls and stacked on top of each other, pay homage to the greatclassic of modern sculpture, Constantin Brancusi’s Endless Column.The records’ colours mimic the striped pattern of Gregor Hildebrandt’spartner’s mother’s sweater, thus taking up private, almost intimatemotifs. At a time when it seems commonplace that music, in the formof digital files, has evaporated into the ubiquitous ‘cloud’, records,video and audio tapes are often seen as obsolete storage media. Butin Hildebrandt’s artworks, it is precisely these media that enable theabstract pieces of music to acquire a body, to remain tangible; theyrepresent a direct link to the musical work and the performers—as wellas the legends and myths associated with them. As analog objects,they are direct impressions of events, of transmitted acousticvibrations, which, precisely because they remain silent, open up aspace for the viewer’s imagination, for subjective associations, thusforming a resonance space for a kind of inner listening.

Gregor Hildebrandt’s process for creating his works actually producestwo images, similar to analog photography: a positive and a negative.Sound or video tapes mounted on canvases are further processed bythe artist using acrylic paint, often with gestural markings reminiscentof abstract expressionist artists. The tapes are then peeled off againand, depending on how the canvas has been prepared, the magneticlayer may or may not stick to the canvas. The removed tapesthemselves form a kind of negative of the first picture and are mountedon a second canvas, forming the complementary counterpart to thefirst picture, both carrying the same music and signs, only inverted, likeflickering mirror images or echoes of barely remembered dreams.

The interplay between negative and positive is itself the subject oftwo new works, which consist of cassette tape racks—the paperinserted into the sleeves forming the motifs. Donna (2024) depictsthe actress Natalie Portman wearing make-up for her role in DarrenAronofsky’s 2010 film Black Swan. It shows the path of an ambitiousdancer in her self-destructive struggle to claim the antagonistic rolesof the black and white swans in Piotr Tchaikovsky’s ballet SwanLake, which dramatically escalates in hallucinatory episodes untilthe cadence, which deals with artistic perfection and self-destruction. In the ink jet print of the actress’s portrait there is a hole torn bythe artist, like a large tear, through which the original titles on thecassette sleeves reveal themselves. There, the name of pop divaMadonna stands out, introducing another layer of pop-culturalreferences, an intensification and distillation of the portrayal of theobsessive artist.

Umatmen erwünschte Lüfte dir die beruhigte Flut (2024, in awkwardapproximation by the author, and only for the purpose of this text:breathe in the desired air on the calm tide) is a nearly untranslatableline from the 1801 hymn dedicated to divinity in nature and the gloriesof ancient Greece, Der Archipelagus, by Friedrich Hölderlin. It waswritten in what is now Bad Homburg, Hildebrandt’s birthplace, andbegins with the motif of returning cranes. Hildebrandt’s work bearingthis title takes the subject of white and black swans and in turn depicts two swans facing each other, inspired by Swedish painterHilma af Klint’s most famous painting: The Swan, Group IX/SUW, No.1 (1915), showing a white swan on a black background and a blackswan on a white background, their beaks and the tips of their wingstouching. For Hilma af Klint, the swans symbolised the overcoming ofa world that was deeply polarised along dualities such as good and evil,day and night, man and woman. At the beginning of the twentiethcentury, the artist experienced a creative phase lasting several years,during which she perceived her hand as being guided by a higherpower 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 onits head, her white swan is black in his painting and vice versa, but thefundamental change hardly alters the overall impression and thusemphasises 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 andwhite inlays. The information on the backs of the cassettes thusremains partially visible,—in what at first glance seems like an arbitraryarrangement of titles and artist, resulting in a kind of meta-poem, fullof emotional confusion, dream images and chimeras, memories andfantasies. Where the beaks of the two swans meet, on the back of acassette, there is only a single word: lover.

Andreas Schlaegel (writer, artist)

Press release courtesy Perrotin