Klasse Gregor Hildebrandt

“Looking back ahead”, especially in unusual times like these, is a phrase that can adopt highly individual form and gestalt as a conceptual allegory. Memories and visions of the future, nostalgia and uncertainty… or a link between two poles in the here and now.

But from a purely spatial point of view, a “look back ahead” is created when we spy through the treetops of the academy garden to the gallery–or back again to the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. However, the gallery does not only have neighbourly links with the academy. Gregor Hildebrandt, part of the gallery’s programme for several years now, has been a committed teacher of painting and graphic arts there since 2015. This connection has been visualized already by a delicate cassette tape stretching from window to window. This time, there will be direct eye contact with the class–as the invitation motif illustrates so aptly.

We are delighted to invite 13 students of Prof. Hildebrandt to Galerie Klüser within the framework of NEUSTART KULTUR, and funded by Stiftung Kunstfonds. They are presenting a diverse group of works which both explore and demand changes in perspective.

Here, the dust of times long past is assembled into new images of transience, while elsewhere a change of perspective is manifested in a return to old acquaintances from art history or handcrafted objects for daily use. Symbols of vanitas (but also of the inexorable passage of time) are found in classical to unconventional interpretations. Stellar figures in the art world are quoted and recomposed. Very personal memories of places visited, motifs from childhood, but also the time before and during the pandemic flow into the exhibition. Music literally becomes a carrier of memories, sound an acoustic translation of verbal compositions. Supposedly intangible components such as light and reflection play with the viewer’s perceptions and generate the freedom to look back to the future in a purely abstract way.

The exhibition is also helping us to look back, in a temporal sense, to a future when the normality of “before” has returned: we are looking forward to beginning this with young and promising positions in art, curated by Gregor Hildebrandt.

Funded by NEUSTART KULTUR and Stiftung Kunstfonds