11/11
Installation view
Photo: Dirk Tacke
10/11
Annabell Häfner
Seven Hills 35, 2024
Acrylic, chalk and oil on canvas
73 × 80 cm
© Annabell Häfner / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2024
9/11
Installation view
Photo: Dirk Tacke
8/11
Annabell Häfner
Seven Hills 39, 2024
Acrylic, chalk and oil on canvas
110 × 125 cm
© Annabell Häfner / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2024
7/11
Installation view
Photo: Dirk Tacke
6/11
Installation view
Photo: Dirk Tacke
5/11
Annabell Häfner
room with a view 11, 2023
Acrylic, chalk and oil on canvas
68 × 76 cm
© Annabell Häfner / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2024
4/11
Installation view
Photo: Dirk Tacke
3/11
Installation view
Photo: Dirk Tacke
2/11
Annabell Häfner
Seven Hills 25, 2024
Acrylic, chalk and oil on canvas
50 × 60 cm
© Annabell Häfner / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2024
1/11
Annabell Häfner
Seven Hills 25, 2024
Acrylic, chalk and oil on canvas
50 × 60 cm
© Annabell Häfner / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2024
We are delighted to announce the second solo exhibition of the German painter Annabell Häfner, entitled “The Void of Now” at Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle.
In poetic dreamscapes, the artist explores the relationship between anthropogenic infrastructure and nature. Abstract landscapes already suggested in her previous works have become increasingly concrete. Through placement and omission, mountain ranges and cloud formations take on greater significance. Inspired by stories of her childhood (such as those of the Siebengebirge, the seven-hill region of northern Germany said to have been created by seven giants on the banks of the Rhine), Häfner explores myths and legends.
One of her inspirations—Japanese woodblock prints and 17th-century ukiyo-e paintings— now comes to the forefront. Color schemes, compositional elements, as well as subjects seem to be borrowed from ukiyo-e, more specifically from the fūkei-ga subgenre. In particular, the clear and simplified lines and formal language, the use of bold but low-contrast color and the resulting subdued pictorial mood are reminiscent of the often graphic, two-dimensional images of the Edo period.
Annabell Häfner's lyrical paintings also reference the content and formal aspects of color field painting’s horizontal compositions and diffuse color fields. With the emergence of color field painting in the 1940s, color took on a qualitatively new meaning concerning space. In 1967, Michel Foucault spoke of the “age of space” and thereby referenced the spatial turn (a shift towards space) in art research and practice from the 1960s onwards. In Annabell Häfner's work, this color space is not only abstract but is composed via a continually repeated spatial structure. This structure suggests an “inside” and “outside” perspective, which merges symbiotically into a highly sensitive entity. The horizontal structure is intersected by a few finely pointed vertical lines to appear like a technical glitch. This glitch opens yet another essential dimension of Häfner's content against which her works can be viewed. The painting’s surreality appears strangely anachronistic, retrospective and forward-looking at the same time. The chosen colors and perspectival inconsistencies emphasize their fictiveness and artificiality. These elements inevitably recall the virtual, imagined visual worlds of more recent immersive applications, which can transcend physical reality through various creative options.
Annabell Häfner's “non-places” (a concept of French anthropologist Marc Augé) serve as metaphors for an efficient and speedy, globally networked multi-option society. Simultaneously, they refer to a paradox in dealing with nature. While nature may be treated as an archetypal place of refuge, retreat and longing, it is also destroyed and exploited by the technological progress of the Anthropocene.
Annabell Häfner (born in 1993 in Bonn) studied from 2014 to 2020 at the Kunsthochschule Weissensee, Berlin, under Werner Liebmann. From 2020-2021, she was a master's student of Prof. Nader Ahriman. She won the Mart Stam Prize 2020 and the Inside Art Fellowship 2020. Her works have been shown in (among others) the Rundgang 50Hertz at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, as well as in renowned private collections in both Germany and the USA. In 2024, she was nominated for the Kallmann Prize, for which individual works will be exhibited at the Kallmann Museum in Spring 2025.
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