Gregor HildebrandtPawn

At a friend’s house Gregor Hildebrandt (*1974) saw a photograph by Will Steacy, an American photographer who had made a series on pawnshops in the USA. This gave him the idea of playing in his turn with the meaning and sense of the word pawnshop and of imagining a shop in which chess pawns, detached from their playful context and thus offered as sculptures, as it were, are for sale. Accordingly, in a wall-filling installation, he had the pawns file past on evenly spaced rows of shelves. With the present artist’s book Gregor Hildebrandt explores manifold variations on the theme, that is, the most diverse chess pieces and chequerboard patterns in the most diverse places: on floors and walls, on items of clothing, as motifs of his own abstract painting and as ornament in a cemetery overseas. Gregor Hildebrandt’s collages, panel paintings, photographic works and installations have always caused astonishment, indeed a stir, for the material he mostly starts out from is analogue data carriers, that is, recorded audio and video tapes and records as well as their cases and sleeves.