IN THE REALM OF POSSIBILITIES OF OBJECTS LUDWIG SEYFARTH, 2017
Hanna Hennenkemper, Re-privat, Galerie Pankow 2017
(Ludwig Seyfarth)
During a residency in the Edvard Munch House in Warnemünde in 2012, Hanna Hennenkemper saw an exhibition there by the renowned Norwegian painter and drawer, Olav
Christopher Jenssen. His series of drawings comprising more than 100 sheets followed, as it were, the biographical traces of his famous countryman. Jenssen drew the outlines of various objects belonging to Munch in his summerhouse, objects which can still be seen there by today’s visitors. Jenssen’s drawings depict the contours of these things but not their exact appearance and physical volume. They inspired Hanna Hennenkemper to take Jenssen’s drawings as templates and “fill” them with finely drawn textures in pencil.
Such appropriation, translation or transference of originals is characteristic of the artist. Hanna Hennenkemper may have developed a decidedly memorable and recognisable visual language, yet her subject is always the outdated idea of artistic originality and authorship. She tackles this subject not least with an ironic sideswipe at the big gesture as the dominating signature of the selfreferential image of an artist, which touches on the idea of creative authorship unfolding independently of role models and influences.
With accurate, detailed work, Hanna Hennenkemper fills the outlines she has borrowed from Jenssen, producing in them forms all her own, which perhaps spring from the unconscious and – expressed in a term the artist uses – originate in her personal reading/interpretation.
Jenssen’s drawings do not always identify the object, and Hanna Hennenkemper has also deliberately avoided this knowledge. The path from the original objects through Jenssen’s drawings to those of Hennenkemper is thus a kind of Chinese Whispers in which the gaps, personal notation and script result in a possibly far different end to the beginning.
The artist thereby alludes to the gaps that are immanent in each historical tradition. The artist sees the rudiments of Jenssen’s outlines, even when they are “only” the representations of simple, everyday objects, as analogous to the remains of walls, the ruins of history that Walter Benjamin describes in his Philosophy of History in almost
literary images.
The glimpse into the historical connection, the “bigger picture” is, however, for Hanna Hennenkemper always directed towards the everyday, the individual object. What
appears to be inconspicuous and is often overlooked produces an almost surreal universe, a precise depiction of things that do not in fact exist. Strange and surreal forms are to found in other areas of Hanna Hennenkemper’s work. A series of conceptually standalone coloured pencil drawings in different formats takes banal, everyday objects, such as chocolate Easter bunny ears, knives or coat hooks, as its starting point.
Hanna Hennenkemper’s formal world thus always moves between abstraction and representation, the organic and the technoid. Many of them are reminiscent of enlarged
microscopic pictures or plant details. The sculptural, swelling forms also give rise to erotic associations, although none of the possible interpretations are “intended”.
The tactile plays an important role, the contact between the paper and the drawing instrument is almost suggestively perceptible throughout. The material qualities evoked by
the represented motifs remain, however, as equally vague as the identities of the objects. The motifs gradually lose their recognisable form – e.g., corkscrew or pliers – and clear readability and, as if through a mysterious transformation, enter a universe existing alongside reality. The more the lengthy, sometimes weeks or monthslong process of apparently painstaking graphical precision work goes into detail, the more the unambiguousness of the represented object is paradoxically eroded and dissolved. The depicted object then becomes a variant or possible option among many.
The ambiguity found in a space of possibilities and potentialities also thereby consistently and repeatedly drives series based on the same or similar sources and single sheets are often completely different “performances” of the same starting motif. The “thing” itself, its function and meaning, now plays only a subordinate role. The handling of the
object seems to be of primary concern. Thus bluered rubbers suddenly appear to be outstretched tongues or elsewhere suggest a reflection of the sun below the horizon. The diverse manifestations of the invariably present rubbers have to do with the different experiences and encounters of the artist on each particular day. They are, as it were, “daily
forms” that effectively constitute the artist’s diary in which she always records the same basic shape.
The question of serials and reproductions also has to do with formal structure when, for example, the same elements are repeated several times in an image. The second main area of Hanna Hennenkemper’s work alongside drawing is printmaking, a method of creating reproductions, although here, too, she almost never produces editions.
The most direct relationship between drawing and printmaking is the lithograph, which prints exactly what is drawn on the stone.
The process is of course far more complicated, as evidenced in Hanna Hennenkemper’s series, Memorieren. Here, we see the coloured stages of an emerging motif in increasing intensity on the lithograph stone, which, as it becomes stronger, can be viewed as a memory slowly coming to the surface print by print. But, as almost always with Hanna Hennenkemper, even when the motif is at its clearest, it is not objectively identifiable.
The “variations”, which are characteristic of her work, resemble different performances of a formal score. The image on each sheet gives rise to very different associations. Sometimes, one can almost see an exterior motif, a landscape with a ravine or waterfall, perhaps, and on another sheet, the enlargement of a microscopic view of the body’s interior. In this series, the artist also plays with positive and negative shapes, flatness and space like a picture puzzle. It appears to open up an albeit difficult to locate, illusory spatial depth while the print is at the same time distinctly tangible on the surface.
As stated, the world and the things in it provide Hanna Hennenkemper with a realm of possibilities that can always be observed or drawn differently. Comparing and choosing the possibilities is akin to curatorial practices. Her installation, absolut o. T. (2017), thus presents numerous drawings and prints produced over the last twenty years that seem like sketches
or single pieces whose paths are not or have not yet been further developed. These drawings form combinations on a blue-painted wall, which again deliver one possibility from
many. The viewer can choose to read the blue wall as a reference to the coloured walls of a Petersburg hanging in classical collections, or as a blue box – a simulation space on which
appropriate backgrounds can be projected for film or television productions.
Hana Hennenkemper’s drawings and prints can also be interpretedas projection surfaces or spaces in which historical or political backgrounds and contexts can appear, which, however, repeatedly lead back to the private realm. Each possible interpretation is a type of supplementation that adds something to the fragmentary body of the presentation.
As Hanna Hennenkemper’s art always stays in a realm of different possibilities, she points out the incompleteness and blind spots of every representation and tradition.
Ludwig Seyfarth, 2017
(Translation: Heather Allen)