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Ulrike Hogrebe's paintings are not garrulous descriptions, but rather quite the opposite: small bits of news, tiny notes, set like graffiti in large fields of colour which are staggered next to or across from one another. There are headless human figures, tightrope walkers standing on their heads or hanging in the air, baby dolls, and bon vivants. Scattered houses, tables, chairs, ladders, and containers. Appendage-like plants, deer and horses, severed heads, hands, legs and feet, male figures with antlers growing from their heads. One might assume great dramatic stories behind all this, but Ulrike Hogrebe likes rather the small and miniature format of her bizarre background figures, in a way the miniatures of the insinuated happenings.
Here the representational world is once again depicted in its pre-language individual parts, as a quotation, as an outline without perspective. The aim here is not to illustrate the world, but to de-scribe it in the form of a figured sign-alphabet that we can barely decipher or read. Ulrike Hogrebe's motifs set impulses, are fragments of what was once whole, they impart the "fascinating aura of an archaeological quest for the traces of man" (Süddeutsche Zeitung). Nonetheless, her paintings, with their horizontal lines and symmetric forms, possess a kind of balance, impart a feeling of "inner peace", a certain stability, and with their independent narrative character they encourage the viewer "to discover their own pictorial story in them".
Text by Walter Aue |
