Nic HessDrawing Installations 1995–2013

The installation drawings that Nic Hess executes in temporarily occupied spaces connect his own work with the works of other artists within a complex system of lines, planes, quotations and pictorial fragments of realist painting that spans the entire space. Viewed art-historically, what takes place here is the attempt to create a contemporary, stage-like narrative space – “as an interplay of the space of memory and pictorial narrative, as a narrative space which the viewer can frequently grasp in its entirety at a single glance and can also ’read out’ while walking, in the succession and sequence of its elements,” as Renate Wiehager writes. This leads as if of its own accord to a reconnaissance flight of the eye and touches again and again upon the dialectical relationship between image and time, for a back and forth always rests on a temporal structure as well. This elegance of the flâneur is subtly heightened by the concrete incorporation of so-called icons of classical modernism. Here almost Pop-art-like modes of quotation alternate with the gentle and ironic integration of real works. The catalogue raisonné now presented here, carefully compiled by Christian Ganzenberg together with the artist, reproduces all of Nic Hess’s installations to date and demonstrates in impressive fashion this quite exceptional form of contemporary installation art!

Exhibition:
Daimler Contemporary, Berlin, 17/10/2013–16/3/2014