Andrea Hess
Of Unspeakable Girls and Weavings
Andrea Hess and the thaumaturgic ritual of art
By Sabina Ghinassi (translation from Italian):
In a 2010 essay, accompanied by images and reflections by the painter and scholar Monica Ferrando, Giorgio Agamben addresses the exegesis of the myth of Kore, the unspeakable girl, daughter of Demeter and abducted by Hades; eternal inhabitant of life and death, an oxymoronic maiden bearing both chthonic and celestial thresholds. Kore/Persephone possessed, even more than Athena, the attribute of weaving. Who better than she, journeying between the world of light and the world of darkness, could retie warp and weft of mortal lives? Who better than she, like the nymphs of the Cave in the Odyssey, could weave upon great stone looms “purple cloaks, wondrous to behold,” our fragile and precious bodies and lives, the April sun and the winter night? The latest series of works by Andrea Birgit Hess takes us by the hand and gently accompanies us into these spaces, almost unknowingly. It does so through a kind of thaumaturgic ritual of art that belongs to her very way of being an “artist.” It has to do with weaving, though not exclusively. Even when there is no weaving, she speaks the same language, constructs the same bodies, grafts the same simple and profound sensations: the succession of references, memories, hidden connections, beauty. It is in relation to the body and the affection of the body, to the habitus-home in which we live, to the habitus-body that allows us to exist and remain where we are, to the Umwelt into which we sink our experiences; it sinks into our gaze, our feelings, our failures. Through her weavings Hess traverses the world; she reconstructs it like a small demiurge beginning from the humblest, simplest, and seemingly most banal aspects; she gathers, chisels, and creates through delicate metamorphoses with the light grace of a butterfly, thanks to a relationship with materials that is always free yet perfectly calibrated, precise, exact, centered, sensory, pacified. These are works that seem to dance. Fabrics, thread, plaster and alabaster, aggregations of dense and precious oils, almost like a poetic ignition, an opening of the horizon, a sudden expansion of the heart. They may be landscapes, horizons, frames of nature in fieri, in transformation, reverberations of memory, everyday life becoming something else, memento mori, flowers, still lifes, flashes of images returning after a sunny day; laundry hanging on a line, boats along the canal, alleyways, or even the images of a love story, frame after frame: precious cameos of narratives that at least once illuminate every life with golden purity. For Hess, every work becomes a ritual, hierophanic and thaumaturgic practice, of constant initiation into the mysteries and fragile beauty of life, of consecration to the tears and smiles of days; an incessant and never-ending tale, filled with nostalgia and beauty, with light and shadow. This slipping between materials through an ever-dazzling poetic graft has accompanied Hess’s path from the very beginning. Her past is marked by training at the Academy of Fashion and Costume in Germany and by a coup de foudre for mosaic in Ravenna many years ago, a city that over time became a place of affection, a second home of the heart to which she returns. Here, during her studies at the Academy of Fine Arts, she began an even more tactile and emotional relationship with materials through a gesture capable of building soft relationships between surfaces, with scratches, light incisions, caresses, and colors always precious and luminescent, as if from a fairy tale. And then the return to Freiburg, the beloved children, the Black Forest embracing with its green the streets and the artist’s work, always perfectly precise, balanced, in dialogue with an invisible that is always visible, in silence. In her works she celebrates the simple presence within the events of life; she weaves the canvases, constructs warp and weft, gathers and narrates stories, always perfectly and gently unpredictable.
When the ‘Thread-Drawing’ Moves into the ‘Open Field’
Stuttgart as her birthplace, Ravenna as the place of study, and Freiburg as her place of work form the coordinates of the life path and artistic practice of Andrea Hess; a triangle of centers of excellence stretching across the Alps, places where European cultural heritage has been formed and distinguished itself through constant exchange. Padua, a twin city of Freiburg, further strengthens the relationship between these historic university cities through another exhibition of works created for the Barco Teatro. In a different way than in the 2017 exhibition at San Gaetano, Andrea Hess once again reveals the reserved mode of operation from which she draws when responding “iconographically” to her surroundings. In the earlier text, before a group of small and precious figures, I suggested the perception of “hidden theatres of memory – born from the decisive function of mending and sewing as an ancient feminine gesture – where small fragments of fabric served as casting molds for the realization of the individual works.”
With consistency and variety, she succeeds in bringing “photographic” fragments of lived experience to life. The respective technique emerges within the creative process as visualized thought and as the lingering of memory, revived through the work and its viewer. In this new body of work there appears that mechanical device which “ennobled” the feminine arts: the sewing machine, so significantly present within the Second Avant-Gardes, accelerates and expands the expressive dimension of the original acts of sewing and mending. It multiplies the “performative” and gestural movement of a spool of thread that seems never-ending, prolonging the “drawn narrative” guided by inexhaustible thought through hand and machine: “My sewn drawings arise associatively from an inner image. There is an initial impulse around which the thread subsequently develops. I allow myself to be guided by an interplay of thoughts, music, memories, curiosity, surprise, and not least the technology itself. What is truly essential is not to lose the inner thread,” says Andrea Hess.
Freed from its domestic and artisanal function and reduced to a purely aesthetic one, the “thread-drawing,” like an anarchic “spider’s thread,” ventures into the “open field,” weaving its narrative while encountering resting places and diversions along the way. The traversal of space does not reveal itself through casual and/or confused use of the thread, but rather through our own reading, through recognition – something the curling fabric seems constantly capable of dissolving. The cluster of material formed where the thread pauses or narrows within the traversed territory, before setting out again toward new geographies, suggests to the collector that it is “…like a film one wishes to materialize in its movement … through the limited visibility of the resulting line, the sewing machine frees me from the knowledge of things and their learned order … so that although loops and connecting threads may arise, there is only ONE beginning and ONE end. As in real life.” Bed sheets and fragments of real life encounter one another, exchanging positions and roles, while our perception follows the images, retraces the development of the work, pauses incredulously and uncertainly, hesitates over a term for that recognizability which only individual empathy can attain … only then to welcome independence from the “drawn” reality.
By Andrea B. Del Guercio, 2021
“Happy, New” by Andrea Hess at Galerie Merkle, 2018
Opening speech by Birgit Wiesenhütter, January 19, 2018
Andrea Hess’s “Happy” and “New” hangs here on the walls of Galerie Merkle and welcomes us at the beginning of the year. This does not mean that the works merely spread cheerfulness; it means that they are full of vitality and atmosphere, addressing and touching the viewer in a positive way. They testify to a sensitivity and depth both in perception and in execution, but also to humor.
The artist, born in Stuttgart, lives and works in Freiburg im Breisgau, but also spent extended periods in Italy, studying sculpture in Carrara and Ravenna. In the titles of some works, the connection to the Italian language that stems from this experience can still be heard.
That Andrea Hess comes from sculpture is absolutely tangible and comprehensible in her works. It determines the way she expresses herself artistically, which does not mean that all her works are three-dimensional. Here at Galerie Merkle she presents plaster objects as well as oil drawings. Both groups of works are created using an individual technique developed by the artist.
Her “oil drawings” emerge in several layers. First, the surface is prepared with colored acrylic paint, then everything is overpainted with oil paint so that the original coloration is no longer visible. Into this layer of paint Andrea Hess scratches her drawing while the oil paint has not yet dried. The resulting lines reveal the color of the underlying layer. In some works the artist elaborates individual sections with graphite; sometimes a graphite drawing also lies beneath the layers of paint.
The motif arises from contemplating the still untouched oil layer. The artist draws it from her memory. These are inner images that she does not invent but has seen. The underlying coloration serves as an atmospheric foundation for discovering the motif. With only a few lines she brings the image of her imagination onto the pictorial ground. Although the radiant coloration of her pictures suggests painting, it is drawing – the contour-like representation of corporeal imagination in two dimensions – that interests Andrea Hess. At the academy in Italy, anatomical drawing was part of the curriculum. There she trained the confidence with which she now employs the line.
The luminous coloration is counterbalanced by a reduced drawing whose lines outline and suggest the bodies while saying everything necessary. Radiant fields of color stand opposite dark, structured ones. In the drawn structures, the color shines forth once again. It is a formal balancing act – the tension must be right. Everything merely suggested is sufficient as information and encourages the viewer to continue seeing. Shading is unnecessary in Andrea Hess’s drawings in order to create spatiality. Form and contour alone are enough for her. Everything else already lies within them.
Andrea Hess’s oil drawings depict people, groups, encounters, as if in a timeless space of color. In layers that penetrate one another and are interwoven, the viewer senses a calmness and intimacy that represent something existential.
Small motifs in the pictures that shine forth chromatically were masked by the artist on the acrylic layer of the background before the oil layer was applied over everything. After completing the drawing and once the oil layer has dried, the masking is removed. Surely an exciting moment, when their effect within the picture becomes visible. These small attributes stand out chromatically as well as through their flatness; they often break the seriousness of certain pictures and prevent them from becoming heavy. They correspond with the drawn motif and sometimes even comment on it, as for example in the work “volare” (“to fly”), where we find a small dove of peace carrying an olive branch in its beak.
Another group among her oil drawings are the so-called “sky vessels.” Here she works from photographs. These “vessels” of the sky are silhouettes of houses and street canyons from specific places. The artist begins a play with positive and negative forms that jump forward and backward for the viewer. The title points toward the dark, structured part of the drawing, toward the “vessel,” yet chromatically it is the bizarre, sharply bounded form of the sky that stands out.
Andrea Hess continues these sky forms into the three-dimensional realm as a group within her plaster objects. Here too, the line plays an important role for the artist. She virtually draws it with the sewing machine. She sews a fabric bag that serves as a casting mold and fills it with colored alabaster plaster. After the plaster has set and dried, the fabric is removed; the seam remains sharply visible as a contour line in relief and determines the actual form of the object. The structure of the fabric imprints itself onto the surface of the object. Indeed, the surface often appears as though the fabric were still there. One would most like to touch it – but the material does not forgive. Therefore: Please do not touch!
With the structure of the chosen fabric, the artist intervenes formally. Some titles humorously refer to this, for example the work “Rom feingerippt” (“Rome finely ribbed”). A fragment of sky above Rome now appears as a completely non-representational object with a ribbed surface.
Alongside these sky fragments in their bizarre forms, there are also other plaster wall objects. Figurative and non-representational elements merge fluidly within these works. Some forms appear entirely free of objecthood and yet can still evoke figuration. Personally, I was only able to see the work “Sterntaler” as a girl spreading out her dress to catch stars after reading the title – but then quite clearly. In others, such as “Liberty,” the silhouette of the Statue of Liberty, which also appears as a small motif in an oil drawing, the figurative origin is clearly recognizable. These more figurative objects reveal how well trained we are to interpret the posture of a figure. Whether bent over or leaning toward another decisively influences how it is perceived, what emotional world emerges from it, what it radiates. Andrea Hess handles these forms with great sensitivity. In the sculptural work “Evergreen,” we can recognize two heads inclined toward one another, whose closeness without touching suggests a loving couple. The title “Evergreen” humorously breaks this intimacy into the banal. Yet the expression of tenderness and humanity remains.
Andrea Hess offers us spaces of color and image, forms and pictorial bodies whose sensitive composition never overwhelms us, but instead creates tension-filled compositions full of atmosphere and radiance. She transforms the inner images of her memory without pathos into atmospherically dense, touching, and powerful pictures. These are highly personal pictorial works that expose nothing, but very directly convey emotional worlds – indeed humanity.
In a conversation about Andrea Hess’s pictures with an elderly lady who had worked professionally with art throughout her life and still does, she finally said with great admiration in her voice about the artist: “How courageous she is!” I can only agree.
Birgit Wiesenhütter
Georg-Scholz-Haus. Andrea Hess and Alexander Schönfeld.
Opening: Sunday, April 2, 2017.
Introduction: Dr. Antje Lechleiter©, Freiburg
Ladies and Gentlemen,
with Andrea Hess and Alexander Schönfeld, two artists from Freiburg are guests here today. Before this exhibition, the two knew each other only superficially, yet the title “shapes & shades” unites their works very fittingly,
and it quickly became clear that they would share several rooms. This is the case downstairs, upstairs in the corridor, and in the green-red Room 4.
Andrea Hess is fundamentally interested in the theme of line and in the forms of silhouettes. In the exhibition she presents oil drawings as well as plaster objects from the series “Homeless” and “Himmel.” The works in this room demonstrate how the artist arrives at illusion-like appearances through the alternation of positive and negative forms. She works in many ways with the transformative nature of pictorial objects. In her studio I saw small, colorful photographic objects that initially appeared to me like images of beautiful Old Master fruit still lifes. Looking more closely, I discovered that beer bottles and dirty ashtrays also lay among the apples. Andrea Hess told me that she had found this “still life” during her walks through the city among the homeless people sleeping beneath Freiburg’s Schwabentor bridge. The plaster objects exhibited here, created since 2014, now also depict the people who belong to these traces left behind. We see them huddled together, slumped over, beside their dogs and with their sleeping bags. The overarching theme “homeless” is intensely reflected in the posture of the figures. In the silhouettes of these people one perceives all the hopelessness and despair that life on the streets entails.
Andrea Hess, who is constantly searching for particular contour forms and arabesque lines, “drew” these objects with a sewing machine. First a fabric sack was created, serving as a casting mold and filled with pigmented plaster. After the fabric was removed, the delicately roughened textile structure remained visible on the surface of the calcium sulfate, while at the same time the seam of the fabric defining the form encircled the hardened object like a drawing with a sharply defined line.
The plaster objects therefore depict observed situations: two figures sitting opposite each other at a table, or couples meeting in embrace and conversation. The calm and unobtrusive manner in which we are confronted here with the theme of the “human being” unfolds with remarkable intensity. Andrea Hess’s objects make us aware of how much information is contained in the posture of a person. Only a slight curve, a bulge or indentation within the contour line determines whether we perceive a person as vital and life-affirming or as lonely and desperate.
Closely related to the objects are the oil drawings. Here too, it is about finding rather than inventing. The point of departure is again situations seen or experienced in the city, small still lifes that the artist stored in her memory or captured with a camera. The realization then took place in the studio, where Andrea Hess first prepared a surface, a stage — for the appearance of the line. Over an acrylic layer she painted with oil and then marked the surface with graphite, which immediately amalgamated strongly with the oil paint. Here too the artist works in a highly process-oriented way, using reactive materials through which she can conceal certain image sections and reveal others.
In the oil drawings of the series “Himmelsgefäße,” the firmament becomes something clearly bounded, for these works depict skies above cities. The artist looked upward between urban canyons and discovered — depending on the architecture of the streets — bizarre formations, fields of sky that she could never have invented herself. Using the mixed technique just described, she transferred these situations onto paper and mounted them on Dibond. The skies now hover as pictorial objects before the wall, and this mode of presentation intensifies the illusion-like forward and backward movement of positive and negative forms, the permanent shift between the dark houses and the little fragment of blue sky. Exploring the relationship between the individual image sections led Andrea Hess to detach the sky-fields from their context and realize them three-dimensionally as plaster objects. Removed from their “vessels,” these skies now act entirely without representational reference; they simply exist, fascinating through the beauty of their contours and glowing into the space with their delicate coloration — entirely without intending or meaning anything…
Excerpt from the introduction on the occasion of:
Ludger Lütkehaus: The Homecoming . BBK South Baden. Art + Literature Series :: 8, Opening at T66 on Sunday, April 30, 2017. Introduction: Dr. Antje Lechleiter©, Freiburg:
Andrea Hess is fundamentally interested in the theme of line and the transformative power of forms. Since 2015, she has been creating these plaster objects, for which she draws using a sewing machine. First, a fabric bag is made, which is then filled with colored plaster. Because the plaster objects lack internal drawings, our attention is focused entirely on the contour line, revealing how crucial the pose of figures is to their expression. With "homeless," Andrea Hess means the state of inner and outer homelessness…
Andrea Hess. The Creativity of Protected Places.
Although the reading and reception of Andrea Hess’s work may appear immediate, perhaps due to the reduction of formal elements and a rigorous selection of iconographic devices, in reality behind each work lies an expressive process of extreme personal sensitivity, yet also rich in conceptually layered values and experiences; each element, whether sculptural or pictorial, that contributes to the succession and development of this new cycle of works responds to a precise series of stages that combine technical concerns with the careful distillation of thought and emotion. The results reveal the dimension of a rare and precious artistic heritage. From the very first observation, directly in the studio, of the numerous small plaster “sculptures,” preserved within intimate “theatres of memory” and arranged upon the walls awaiting monochromatic completion, I felt the need to investigate more deeply the principles underlying their creation in order to understand their true value; above all, I came to recognize the decisive function of mending and sewing, thus of an ancient feminine gesture, small fragments of fabric serving as matrices for the realization of the individual works. Following the contour of the drawing through stitching, in the manner of creating small cloth dolls, Andrea Hess defines the space that the plaster, in its semi-liquid state, would occupy as it rapidly dries, thereby constituting the structure of the work. These two simple and precise conditions define and give substance to an artistic project dedicated to the theme of poverty and exclusion; it is through the experience of mending and through the nature and culture of the materials employed, absorbed into the conceptual reservoir of artistic practice, that the definition of poverty acquires aesthetic substance. Delicacy and rigor, tenderness and specificity appear as the terms of a creativity that is not descriptive but rather interested in the experiential essence of the field of investigation, in the atmosphere surrounding a humanity that is present yet silenced, excluded from relationships and dialogue. If the community of the poor is the privileged subject of Andrea Hess’s work, it is approached by the artist through the values of method and repeatability belonging to the feminine arts, and sustained through references and iconographic devices drawn from a popular religiosity made up of reliquaries and ex-votos. In this way each expressive fragment of Andrea Hess establishes itself as a contemporary expressive reality closely linked to the immense heritage of art history; even more specifically, the field of reference appears to be that of the minor arts, where contributions often find truth in aesthetic quality through the anonymity of making.
The creative dimension of Hess becomes enriched when, during that first encounter in the studio, a chest of drawers revealed an extensive series of landscapes of precious painterly refinement; this constitutes a second expressive direction that interacts, through the restitution of a habitat, with the marginalization of the homeless community. On the level of installation, an interesting cinematic continuity develops between separation and reintegration, estrangement and the restoration of a landscape and environmental placement inhabited by the poor. Here too one must emphasize the conceptual substance that determines the landscape image, often recognizable in the romantic nature of the Black Forest above Freiburg; this is not a descriptive or naturalistic approach, but rather an aesthetic function with moral value: that of exclusion and restitution of the planet, understood as a territory that provides identity. Significant within this expressive field, in counterpoint to the poverty of mending and plaster, is the qualitative richness of a painting rooted in the precious traditions of miniature art.
If within the nucleus of the sculptural works the monochrome color defines, in the manner of Giotto’s “campana,” the anatomical dimension, in the landscapes polychromy finds broad definition and richness of use; if the cycle of the “protected sculptures” records and presents the perception of an anonymous condition of the human subject, in the paintings observation becomes attentive and almost philological toward the variations insistently detailed within them.
Italian text by Andrea Del Guercio on the occasion of the exhibition “Kaleidoskop” 2017 in Padua; translated from Italian:
The Creative Power of Protected Spaces
Even though Andrea Hess’s works may reveal themselves immediately to the eye and the senses – perhaps due to the reduced formal language and the rigorously chosen iconography – behind each work there is in fact an expressive and highly sensitive process that condenses numerous values and conceptually layered experiences; each sculptural or painted individual piece, in the sequence and further development of this new cycle of works, corresponds to a series of transitions in which technical questions are intertwined with the careful clarification of thoughts and emotions. The results reveal the magnitude of a rare and precious artistic practice. Already during the first viewing in the studio of the many small plaster “sculpture figures,” preserved in “small theatres of memory” and distributed across the walls awaiting their monochrome finish, I sensed the necessity of defining the essential contents of the work; above all, I recognized the decisive role of patching and sewing, activities that have always belonged to the female sphere. By following the contours of the drawing through sewing, Andrea Hess defines – following the model of small cloth dolls – the space later occupied by the quickly hardening plaster in its semi-liquid state, thus determining the structure of the work. These two simple and exact conditions shape and give substance to an artistic project devoted to deprivation and exclusion; the definition of poverty gains aesthetic significance as a concept of artistic creation both through the act of patching and through the nature and value of the materials employed. Delicacy and rigor, tenderness and structure appear to be the contents of Andrea Hess’s artistic practice, which does not describe but rather dedicates itself to the essential experience of this field and to an existing, yet silenced humanity. While Andrea Hess’s preferred subject is that of people living in hardship, the artist opposes it with a methodological and repeatable approach associated with women’s arts, making use of the iconography of popular piety through reliquaries and votive images. Each expressive fragment by Andrea Hess constitutes a contemporary expressive reality closely linked to the legacy of art history; even more specifically, one perceives a reference to craftsmanship, whose often anonymous production gives rise to works distinguished by aesthetic quality.
The creative dimension of Andrea Hess expanded further when, during this first encounter in the studio, an extensive series of carefully composed landscape paintings emerged from a chest of drawers; this constitutes her second artistic mode of expression, reacting to the isolation of the homeless through the restoration of living space. Here too, the conceptual approach must be emphasized, as it determines the landscape image and often manifests itself in the romantic appearance of the Black Forest above Freiburg; this is not a descriptive or naturalistic approach, but rather an aesthetic function with moral value – that of separation and the restitution of the planet as a territory of identity. In contrast to the poverty of patching and the material plaster, what is striking here is the qualitative richness of a painting that reveals interesting affinities with miniature painting.
While the anatomy of the sculptures is defined through monochrome finishing, as in Giotto’s “campana,” the multicolored quality of the landscapes unfolds in a broad definition; while the cycle of “protected sculptures” records the notion of human anonymity, in the paintings one senses an attentive and delicate observation of all the forms of existence insistently described within them.