Ika HuberCoelin

Carefully and precisely, following the placement of the brushstrokes, Rudi Fuchs approaches in his text the new works of this artist, who was born in Freiburg in 1953 and still lives there. The volume “Coelin” – the name of the particular blue she uses in her work – naturally also affords a view of earlier works of a more representational character. In this way the book makes visible the transition to Ika Huber’s very own form of abstraction: how the brushstroke, discernible in earthy brown and still tied to the figurative, detaches itself and becomes free form. This draws the eye into the movement of the brushstroke, and so Rudi Fuchs observes that if these pictures had a voice, “they would whisper.” Ika Huber lays such a “sound” over chalk underdrawings as well, where the flow of the brush is framed and given a scaffolding. And of course it can be heard in the watercolours too. Rudi Fuchs concludes his tribute to Ika Huber with a line by the eccentric Thomas Lovell Beddoes: “A lake / Is a river curled and asleep like a snake,” thus returning once more to the sense of Ika Huber’s procedure, which lets one see the picture from the very beginning and recognise it at every step, and which attains an intensity that he simply calls “beauty.”