Gregor Hildebrandt


Gregor Hildebrandt is a German contemporary artist who lives and works in Berlin, Germany

Early life and education

Gregor Hildebrandt graduated from Hochschule der Künste, Berlin in 2002, after he studied previously at the University of Mainz between 1995-1999. Hildebrandt was awarded a Studienstiftung scholarship between 1998-2002 and received a scholarship at the Deutsches Studienzentrum in Venice the following year, while still a student. Today, he lives in Berlin with fellow artist Alicja Kwade.

Work

In his artistic practice, Gregor Hildebrandt makes extensive use of pre-recorded cassette tapes as material in his pictures and installations. The tapes are applied directly onto canvases and photographic prints and in room-sized installations. In his paintings, he adheres the coated side of cassette tapes onto a canvas, presses on it with a brush or roller, and rips the tape off to create the defined, yet sporadic lines on his works. He repeats the process before finally gluing them onto the canvas for good to create what he calls the “negative” painting. For sculptures, he shapes vinyl records into bowls, sometimes stacking them to create what the artist calls a “sonic wall made of pillars of records.”
Although Hildebrandt’s work makes formal reference to Minimalism, the addition of a great number of subjective and autobiographical citations actually deliberately repudiates this strategy. For Hildebrandt, the cassette tape as artistic medium, especially in its original function of storage medium, fulfils an important function: it enables the artist to add a further “invisible” dimension to his pictures. Playing with perception in this way is a major characteristic of his work; the picture is completed in the head of the viewer.
If the contemplation of his art incorporates the heterogeneous cosmos of Gregor Hildebrandt’s references to music, film, literature and, last but not least, art history, his works turn out to be complex montages, in which pictorial associations from different spheres combine and interpenetrate. Hildebrandt employs the material of his every-day environment without aesthetic or theoretical inhibition and playfully links aspects of conceptual art and minimal art with his personal life and experience of pop culture.
Gregor Hildebrandt is represented by Wentrup in Berlin, Grimm Gallery in Amsterdam, Almine Rech Gallery in Paris, Brussels and London and Emmanuel Perrotin in New York. and Casado Santapau gallery at Madrid.

Selected Solo Exhibitions

2012
2011
2010
2009
2008
2007
2006
2005
2004
2003
2002
2008 -
2008 -
2005 / 2006 - Scholarship, DAAD, Vienna
2004 - Award, GASAG
2003 - Scholarship, Deutsches Studienzentrum Venedig
1998 / 2002 - Scholarship, Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes