Selection #1 by Gregor Hildebrandt

Hildebrandt gregor muenchen mueller hofstede luise

When mentoring emerging painters, it's crucial for Hildebrandt that his students are passionate about what they do and are able to put everything into their art. It is less important that they can paint well; he even finds it beneficial if they cannot.
He cares for his students to build a body of work, gain recognition, and one day be able to make a living from art.

GREGOR HILDEBRANDT'S ARTISTIC PRACTICE

In his artistic practice Gregor Hildebrandt makes great use of pre-recorded cassette tapes as material in his pictures and installations. The tapes are applied directly onto canvases and photographic prints and in room-sized installations. Although Hildebrandt’s work makes formal reference to Minimalism, the addition of a great number of subjective and autobiographical citations actually deliberately repudiates this strategy.

For Hildebrandt, the cassette tape as artistic medium, especially in its original function of storage medium, fulfills an important function: it enables the artist to add a further “invisible” dimension to his pictures. Playing with perception in this way is a major characteristic of his work; the picture is completed in the head of the viewer.

If the contemplation of his art incorporates the heterogeneous cosmos of Gregor Hildebrandt’s references to music, film, literature and, last but not least, art history, his works turn out to be complex montages, in which pictorial associations from different spheres combine and interpenetrate. Hildebrandt employs the material of his every-day environment without aesthetic or theoretical inhibition and playfully links aspects of conceptual art and minimal art with his personal life and experience of pop culture.

Gregor Hildebrandt was born in 1974 in Bad Homburg. He lives and works in Berlin, and is Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich, Germany. His selection for TheArtists is made up of former and current students of his class. Have fun exploring!