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until 25.01. | #4491ARTatBerlin | ZWINGER Galerie shows from 16. November 2024 (Opening 15.11.) the exhibition Romance of Digestion by the artist Margarete Hahner.
Romance of Digestion
You don’t really want to go through this door. Maybe give it a quick shake to open it a crack. Or knock? After all, the picture has the marvellous title ‘Knock, knock’, which oscillates between children’s book and horror movie – and the urge to take a step into the unknown while at the same time clinging to the door frame.
‘Sometimes painting is like a door that you bang against and it doesn’t open,’ says Margarete Hahner. Because deep down you might not want to. But then it often opens anyway. And then the painter feels her way forwards, step by step. Into depths in which the admonitions of a strict Catholic childhood, which she spent in Bamberg, still simmer. An arm peeks out pleadingly from under a lady’s skirt or a strange creature sinks its teeth into an octopus, which is actually a netsuke. A small figure of the kind used in Japan to weigh down kimono belts – and for protection.
Or she has a palm tree shoot through an eyeball – loosely based on Matthew 7.3: ‘Why do you see the mote in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the beam in your own eye?’ This is where the feeling of damnation that pervades Catholicism meets the light-heartedness of California, where Margarete Hahner has lived for almost 20 years after stints in Finland, Portugal and a longer period in Berlin.
And under the Los Angeles sun, the country’s rather short history meets European art history. Sacred art, Art Informel – and Marcel Duchamp. ‘Étant donnés’ is the title of his latest work, which is just such a door – but with two peepholes and a female nude behind it.
But Margarete Hahner doesn’t need to be that specific. Because it’s always about transformation. That’s why she has called her current exhibition ‘Romance of Digestion’. Just as food becomes energy through digestion, it is the visual metamorphoses that unleash her very own powers.
‘Before something develops, it is like a ghost, like smoke,’ says the painter. And to explore this, she dives down or scratches surfaces. In paintings created during the pandemic, she looks at the world through gauze impressions. Then again, a vase floats in an indeterminate space, into which soaps are passed from three directions. Nothing is set, everything remains vague. Just like the camel, whose back is also a face. Margarete Hahner calls these moments ‘visual slips of the tongue’, in which you suddenly see something that you haven’t seen before.
Sometimes the circumstances show her the way. The dry paint residue on the painting palette, which is cared for like a pet or a plant. Scratched off and with a long brush that not only creates distance but also points to the future, this is how the ‘Family Constellation’ was created. The painting is impasto and crusty, with crockery on it that glows like the residual colours, kidneys, egg cells and strange creatures that float. And footsteps seek their way. Painting that tidies up. Or is like housework. After all, the grotesque is never far away. And so a woman kneels on the floor and her broom could also be a paintbrush. ‘A stain that becomes art in painting is simply dirt in the house.’
Sabine Danek
Opening: Friday, 15. November 2024, 7 – 9 pm
Exhibition dates: Saturday, 16. November until Saturday, 25. November 2024
To the gallery
Title image caption: Margarete Hahner, courtesy of ZWINGER Galerie
Exhibition Margarete Hahner – ZWINGER Galerie | Zeitgenössische Kunst in Berlin | Contemporary Art | Ausstellungen Berlin Galerien | ART at Berlin
