Annabell Häfner is one of Germany’s most exciting emerging artists. We are pleased to present her first solo exhibition at Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle, featuring works that conceptually examine the experiences of ephemerality and the fast-paced nature of our modern globalized world. Her current work phase is the first to see abstract scenic outlines enter the picture. The architectural space grows less and less concrete in Annabell Häfner’s more recent works. Back- and foreground seem to blend into a single entity. The serial repetition of the spatial motif pushes the actual function and architecture of places to the back, where they become compression fields of aesthetic experience. In glazed paint applications with opaque overpaintings in chalk, her current work complex oscillates between definition, omission, and allusion, appearing in part sketchlike, in part sharply contoured. The background determines the basic mood, other elements emerge via association.Guided by a superordinate interest in how to capture the ephemeral in painting, the artist creates formal and textual parallels to film stills. Fixing a moving image freezes a transitional moment; the result are blurs, vague color gradients, lacunae. Conceptually, the artist also deals with the idea on “non-places”—a term coined by the French anthropologist Marc Augé. It describes functional spaces devoid of identity and without any deeper history that result from an increasingly modernized, accelerated world with a tendency for volatility.In Annabell Häfner’s works, these anonymous, identity-free places suddenly become hyper-surreal, highly delicate, fictional spaces that are exalted in their atmospheric expression and appear as symbols of these experiences of ephemerality. The canvases form a finestra aperta—not quite in the original sense of Leon Battista Alberti as perfected images of reality inviting us to step inside, but rather as unerring sensory illusions of an ostensible reality that seem, uncannily, all-too familiar to us.Annabell Häfner (b. 1993) studied at the Weißensee School of Art and Design Berlin in the class of Werner Liebmann from 2014 to 2020. From 2020 to 2021, she was in the masterclass of Prof. Nader Ahriman. She is the recipient of the 2020 Mart Stam Prize and the 2020 Inside Art Fellowship. Her works were shown at Rundgang 50Hertz at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin and are already part of acclaimed private collections, especially in Germany and the United States.
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