Annabell Häfner: The Void of Now

In the organizer's words:

We are delighted to announce the second solo exhibition of the German painter Annabell Häfner entitled "The Void of Now" at Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle.

In poetic dreamscapes, the artist explores the relationship between anthropogenic infrastructure and nature. The abstract landscape suggestions that were already present in the last phase of her work become increasingly concrete. Through placement and omission, mountain ranges and cloud formations in particular take on greater significance. Inspired by legends from her childhood, such as that of the Siebengebirge, according to which seven giants are said to have created those very hills on the banks of the Rhine, Häfner explores myths and legends.

One of her sources of inspiration - Japanese woodblock prints and ukiyo-e paintings, which date back to 17th century Japan - now comes to the fore. Color schemes and compositional elements, as well as subjects, seem to be borrowed from ukiyo-e, and more specifically from the fūkei-ga subgenre. In particular, the clear and simplified lines and formal language, the use of strong but low-contrast color and the resulting subdued pictorial mood are reminiscent of the often graphic, two-dimensional paintings of the Edo period.
Annabell Häfner's lyrical paintings also make reference to the content and formal aspects of Color Field Painting in their horizontal composition and the formation of diffuse color fields. At the latest since the emergence of color field painting in the 1940s, color has taken on a qualitatively new meaning in relation to space. In 1967, Michel Foucault spoke of the "age of space", picking up on the spatial turn - a turn towards space - that took place in art research and practice from the 1960s onwards. In Annabell Häfner's work, this color space is not only abstract, but is actually formed compositionally in a serially repeated spatial structure that suggests an "inside" and "outside" in perspective, which merge symbiotically into a highly sensitive entity. The horizontality of the pictorial structure is intersected by a few, finely pointed vertical lines, which have the effect of a technical image glitch .
It is precisely this glitch that opens up another essential dimension of content in Häfner's works, against the background of which her works can be viewed. In their surreality, the paintings appear strangely anachronistic; retrospective and forward-looking at the same time. Their fictionality and artificiality are emphasized by the chosen use of colour and inconsistencies in perspective. This is inevitably reminiscent of virtual, imagined visual worlds, as we know them from more recent immersive applications, which can transcend the possibilities of physical reality in their creative variety of options.

Annabell Häfner's "non-places " - a concept that goes back to the French anthropologist Marc Augé - serve her as metaphors for an efficiency- and speed-driven, globally networked multi-option society.At the same time, they point to a paradox in dealing with nature, which on the one hand is treated as an archetypal place of refuge, retreat and longing, and on the other hand experiences destruction and exploitation as a result of the technological progress of the Anthropocene.

Annabell Häfner (*1993 in Bonn) studied from 2014-2020 at the Kunsthochschule Weissensee, Berlin in the class of Werner Liebmann. From 2020-2021 she was a master student of Prof. Nader Ahriman. She was the winner of the Mart Stam Prize 2020 and received the Inside Art Fellowship 2020. Her works have been shown in the Rundgang 50Hertz at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin,among others, and are already in renowned private collections, especially in Germany and the USA. In 2024, she was nominated for the Kallmann Prize, for which individual works will be exhibited at the Kallmann Museum in spring 2025.