Barbara Hindahl
Alles aus Liebe
02/07 - 24/09/2023

In her drawing practice, Barbara Hindahl focuses on seemingly incidental, often overlooked or repressed things. In a manner reminiscent of old masters, she draws puddles, color splashes or dust bunnies, computer misprints as well as the backs of scribble sheets, on which writing or symbolic characters have been pressed through, using pencils or crayons. Hindahl is only superficially interested in the photorealistic reproduction of her motifs. Upon closer inspection, the object of representation dissolves into a complex graphic microcosm that asserts its own reality. In fact, Hindahl’s works are characterized by a formal and content-related permeability that challenges our perception and opens up playful spaces for thought.

The exhibition Barbara Hindahl - Alles aus Liebe [All because of Love] shows a selection of works from different work groups from 2008 to 2023, including drawings and two video works. The focus of the exhibition is on the artist’s two new series of works: BrushStrokes (2020/2021) and Pfützen/Puddles (2022/2023). Works from the ongoing series Rückseiten [Backsides] and “Dirt Fiction” as well as millimeter paper works are also exhibited.

The new series of works BrushStrokes shows monochrome, gesturally expressive brushstrokes in abstract formations, which Hindahl transfers to large-format papers with meticulous precision. The sheets do not seem to follow any compositional impetus; they appear partly shadowy, like studies, with large blank spaces and isolated splashes of color and spots. In fact, it is the painterly gesture per se that the artist here subjects to a precise graphic analysis. Despite all the craftsmanship perfection, Hindahl is never concerned with reproduction or imitation. Rather, the act of drawing entails reflection and reinvention, even appropriation. Hindahl is interested in the "small discrepancy between what it pretends to be and what it really is - it, the depicted, the represented."

With Pfützen/Puddles, another new series of works by Barbara Hindahl is presented in the exhibition. Here, she dedicates herself to the motif of puddles, which are often created accidentally and unintentionally. In portrait format, mostly DIN A3, uses pencil to render the vague, wet surfaces on paper. However, her work begins beforehand when Hindahl creates the puddles herself in her studio, like a laboratory experiment. In the series Backsides, Hindahl transfers seemingly insignificant scribbled notes on which writing or symbolic characters have been pressed through.

Since 2012, Barbara Hindahl has been dedicating herself to millimeter paper. In the series of the same name, the artist draws her own millimeter paper, without striving for a reliable implementation of the template down to the millimeter range. In some sheets, Hindahl has completely abandoned the grid of the order system and makes them appear like a network of rubber threads or like a mesh net whose structure dissolves into a self-contained tangle of lines.
Other works shown in the exhibition belong to the Dirt Fiction complex of works, which has been in existence since 2013. Her fascination in this series is based on the reproduction of flock-like dust formations.
In addition to the drawings, the two video works Star Dust from 2022 and Eden from 2008/2014/2024 will also be shown in the exhibition. Star Dust shows magnetic dust fields that attract each other, dust particles that gradually clump together and dissolve until the image of a unique universe is created. For the video Eden, the artist redirected an ant trail to an ‘island’ specially built for this purpose. The relocation and cultivation of the new ant world presents the society of the ant state in detail.

Barbara Hindahl (born 1960, lives in Mannheim and Hanover) studied painting and drawing at the State Academy of Fine Arts Karlsruhe with Prof. Peter Ackermann. She teaches in Hanover at the Hanover University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Faculty Media, Information and Design.

On the occasion of the new series of works presented in the exhibition, the catalog Lost Paintings will be published by Distanz Verlag.