Gregor Hildebrandt: Pawn

Pawnshop

Gregor Hildebrandt (*1974) saw a photo of Will Steacy, an American photographer who had made a series about pawnshops in the USA, at a friend's house. This gave him the idea of playing with the meaning and sense of the word pawnshop and imagining a shop in which pawns are for sale, detached from their playful context and therefore as sculptures, as it were. Accordingly, he had the pawns displayed in a wall-filling installation in evenly spaced rows of shelves. In this artist's book, Gregor Hildebrandt explores many different variations on the theme, i.e. the most diverse chess pieces and chess patterns in the most diverse places, on floors and walls, on items of clothing, as motifs for his own abstract paintings and as ornaments in an overseas cemetery. Gregor Hildebrandt's collages, panel paintings, photographic works and installations have always caused astonishment, even a stir, as he mostly uses analogue data carriers, i.e. recorded audio and video tapes and records as well as their housings and covers, as his source material.