GREGOR HILDEBRANDT – UTOQUAI

Last summer, Gregor Hildebrandt swam from one well-intentioned, more or less reassuring piece of advice to the next, thinking of a swimmer from film history directed by Sydney Pollack and Frank Perry in 1968. In The Swimmer, Burt Lancaster plays Ned Merrill, who crosses the pools of his posh neighbourhood one after another, going in the same direction and covering manageable distances. Parallel to this summer day spent in swimming trunks, a surrealist journey through time into the protagonist’s past unfolds across the front gardens of his old acquaintances.
The Utoquai work series combines the messages in Lake Zurich and the ‘river of pools’, as Ned calls his route home through private swimming pools; the film forming the basis of the images made from VHS tapes. While the water comes up to his neck, they float like visual anchor points above an invisible horizon – at the same level as the artist’s bottom lip.


A digression leads, at least metaphorically, from these inland waters to The Sea. Thomas Huber gave the same title to his 1987 painting of a mirror-smooth wooden floor with a scrubbing brush, bucket, cleaning cloth and a bottle of salt. Mixed with water, the salt pours in salt-water into the room, past traces disappear and make way for a fresh, unspoilt new beginning – almost like surf on a sandy beach. An earlier work by Hildebrandt – a dark, shiny parquet made of cassette tapes – echoes the ensemble of discarded cleaning utensils from Huber’s interior and translates the scenario into a three-dimensional space we can enter.


The sound of the sea still in our ears, the column’s Mediterranean palette also brings back memories of water and light with countless colour variations. According to colour theory, there are two ways in which yellow can change to violet: through warm or cold tones. François Morellet explored both possibilities in a painting of two concentric squares made in 1956. Gregor Hildebrandt stacks their cross-section into a column of undulating records, thus coming a little closer to the concentric circle.


The sea and water run like a line of buoys through Gregor Hildebrandt’s work, appearing again and again in an oeuvre in which references to music, film and art history, snippets of personal memories and fragments from the era of analogue data carriers are combined into works transporting us into the artist’s unique cosmos.