Gregor Hildebrandt (b. 1974)

Gregor Hildebrandt uses cassettes, vinyl and videotape to create surprising conceptual works. Although he takes stylistic cues from minimalism, his use of the materials of analogue recording weights the resulting objects with a world of biographical and socio-cultural intrigue, registering his own lived experience of popular culture. He deconstructs what was once a container of audio or visual information, creating playful composite objects tinged with these now invisible collective associations.

Black Tulip (E. N. Blume) verges on the figurative, Warhol-style flowers glimmering forth from the visual static of Hildebrandt’s signature monochrome cassette-tape on canvas; the title refers to the US Paradise Garage group Black Tulip, whose 1991 release A Song Of Love (In Times Of  War) was banned from UK airplay during the Gulf War. The emergent flowers seem to gesture towards hope and beauty surviving such suppression, the material trace of the tape graphically reiterating the song’s message. In Object after René Daniels the artist uses cassette tape to form a vinyl ‘record’, poised at an angle by the pencil shafting through its centre. Neither object retains its original communicative function. René Daniels is a Dutch conceptual painter who suffered a brain aneurysm in 1987 at the age of 37, leaving him unable to work or speak: still not fully recovered, he returned to art in 2011, reprising his old painterly motifs in a new light. Hildebrandt’s object speaks of broken but reconfigured modes of language, acting as a poignant and hopeful relic.

In the self-portrait Meine Spiegelung im Spiegel des Spiegels and Alicja Frontal, a portrait of his girlfriend and fellow artist Alicja Kwade, Hildebrandt similarly probes the ambiguity and multiplicity of the recorded image. His subjects are blurred through frosted glass to impressionistic dissolution. The former’s title means ‘My reflection in the mirror of the mirror,’ multiplying implied layers of reflection and feedback as the artist’s face is obscured; Alicja likewise seems to dissipate into a dark, Old Masterly background. Defying easy categorisation, these works coolly navigate the shifting, subjective lenses of art history, popular culture and memory.