Nic Hess’ drawing installations in temporary spaces combine his own work with that of other artists in the shape of a complex, spatially expansive system of lines, surfaces, quotations and pictorial fragments of realistic paintings. From an art-historical point of view, it represents the attempt to create a contemporary, stage-like narrative space – »as an interplay between a space for memory and a visual narrative, as a narrative space which the viewer can assimilate both in its entirety ›in one go‹, as well in the individual elements as he walks by, either sequentially or en masse«, as Renate Wiehager describes it. This leads quite naturally to a kind of reconnaissance mission for the eye and touches continually upon the dialectical relationship between image and time, for a sense of to and fro is also predicated upon a temporal structure. This strolling elegance is intensified by the inclusion of concrete, so-called icons of classical modernism. The use of quotation, itself almost reminiscent of Pop, alternates here with the gentle and ironic integration of real works. The catalogue raisonnné, carefully compiled by Christian Ganzenberg in conjunction with the artist, covers all of Nic Hess’ installations to date, impressively presenting this extraordinary form of contemporary installation.
With texts by Renate Wiehager, Christian Ganzenberg and an interview with Nic Hess by Christian Ganzenberg and quotations by Gianni Jetzer, Rein Wolfs, Elizabeth Finch, Christoph Doswald, Chris Dercon, Robert Summers, Renaud Proch, Stephanie Rosenthal.
ISBN: 978-3-86442-079-5