Stefan Hirsig
The World is Bound With Secret Knots

Klosterfelde gallery is very happy to announce the exhibition The World is Bound with Secret Knots,
comprising large- and small-format canvases, collages and several objects, by Berlin artist Stefan
Hirsig.
In the new works Hirsig has continued and refined his approach, characterized by sampling diverse
painting techniques and a subtle play with cultural codes. A central large-format picture in the first room
impresses at first through its haptic quality, with its burst canvas, the smooth acrylic surfaces cast in
between channels and then again the thickly applied heaps of colour. White splashes of colour on dark
areas bring to mind early art informel paintings and a phase in art theory during which microscopic im-
ages and photographs taken from outer space were supposed to substantiate a representative origin
of the abstract image and thus to administrate a degree of interpretative control. Hirsig seems to attempt
the opposite here - he unsettles by way of presenting highly complex and multi-layered materiality of
paint on canvas, while claiming pictorial central motifs, like landscape or figurative aspects as some-
thing seemingly covert.
Black areas poured onto the canvas and interspersed with light pigment are reminiscent of Google
Earth photographs - other areas of the canvas appear like futuristic scenarios in space, a colourful de-
constructivist figure is adumbrated at the centre. Hirsig plays with our habitual associations and ways
of seeing, baffles with titles like Monk, introduces figures as aliens, or, on a different cinemascopic
canvas, shows traces of landscape with hinted horizon and magical onion spires in the background.
Fragmented, these motifs resurface in a series of small-format canvases were they are complemented
with hundreds of small needles stuck into the thin skin of paint, partly migrating like traces of drawings
along imaginary lines. Then again they are piercing the canvas, with their yellow heads decoratively ar-
ranged in a circle, or are aggressively pressed into conglomerates of colour, as if part of a voodoo-ritual.
The needles turn canvas and colour into a fetish, setting the scene for the pictorial gestures of the ob-
sessed painter.
Collages in square frames, assembled from record covers of the 1970’s and ‘80’s are like memory-
traces of Psychedelia, Punk and New Wave, emerging like fetishes from a distant past. The musical
sources, however, are largely beyond recognition, with the black vinyl records covered with many coats
of paint or stuck in deep layers of material.
The way to spatiality is finally paved with three sculptures consisting of stacked wooden boxes, towering
like man-sized figures in the room. They present endless possibilities of edges and surfaces to the
painter on which grids with fields of colour can be applied and different perspectives tested. By means
of the three-dimensional object the pictorial struggle with spatial optical illusion and flatness of canvas
is being pushed further.

For further information or images please contact the gallery

opening: 27th April, 2007 from 6pm
duration of the exhibition: 17th April – May 26th, 2007
opening hours: Tuesdays through Saturdays 11 – 6 pm and by appointment