Veronika Hilger: Erdbewegungen HILGER

In her paintings, which oscillate between figuration and abstraction, Veronika Hilger addresses classical themes such as landscape and still life. The artist does not separate these two subjects clearly from each other and she does not make it easy for the spectator to decide whether he or she is standing in front of a landscape-like still life or a landscape that appears to be a still life.

Ultimately this decision is not relevant for Veronica Hilger. On the contrary, she seeks answers to fundamental questions concerning the art and meaning of painting in its formal, technical and conceptual realization. What can painting do? What does it have to do to be of relevance and to remain relevant? In asking this, Veronika Hilger sounds the possibilities of abstraction and form finding. She arranges, moves, layers and alters picture elements through a very slow painting process until the outcome feels “natural” to her. In this way, nature serves to explore the processes and possibilities of painting, not the other way around. The mentioned compositions, at the verge of becoming a still life, give her works an organized calmness in spite of the strong colors partially used. This has nothing in common with the calming effect of classic plain air painting, which is a mere depiction of nature, a subject which is not created by mankind and by this, develops free from any strategy. It appears rather, that the single elements on canvas have specifically arranged in this moment for Veronika Hilger to capture.

At the same time it is almost impossible to view a landscape in the context of art only as a landscape and blank out it’s history. Veronika Hilger plays with this matter of fact by referring consciously to Art History and interpreting, quoting and recombining a variety of styles and periods. Within this creative process the artist separates the single elements and gestures from their historical context and appropriates them as part of new settings or solutions.

For some time, the artist is also concerned with ideas of form, materiality, perspective, color, structure and coating in a sculptural way. Her ceramic objects are closely linked to painting and take up many of her working approaches. As her canvases, they mainly have one obverse and a similarly surreal appearance. The sensibility and care in the handling of color, brush style and surface is transferred in three-dimensional space. Veronika Hilger creates autonomous shapes, which appear as references of her self within the context of her pictures, because they originate from the same repertory of forms.

Besides engaging with painting and its contextualization in Art History, Veronika Hilger creates on canvas and ceramic surface a rich associative and emotional space, which encourages thoughts of becoming aware of the world and its resources avoiding too much of a kitschy touch.

Veronika Hilger was born in 1981 in Prien am Chiemsee. She was a student at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich in the class of Axel Kasseböhmer and was honored „Meisterschülerin“ by Jean-Marc Bustamante. After graduating in 2014 she received the award from the Erwin and Gisela von Steiner Foundation as well as a studio grant by the city council Munich. Her works were last presented in the frame of the exhibition “die ersten Jahre der Professionalität” at “Galerie der Künstler” in Munich.