ARCOmadrid22.02.2023–26.02.2023Veronika Hilger, Anna Vogel
Sperling presents Veronika Hilger and Anna Vogel at the Opening section of ARCOmadrid, curated by Julia Morandeira and Yina Jimén.
Anna Vogel (*1981) creates photos or combinations of photography, drawing and print, thematically dealing with digital communication, nature, history and biology. The investigation of these topics is accompanied by a richly imaginative playing with the medium of photography that self confidently transcends the traditional borders of the genre. Vogel took some of the photographs on which her works are based herself; she found others online or created them digitally. Her subjects undergo a large number of analog and digital processes of image editing. She retouches certain visual elements or alters the pictorial composition. The series Ignifertransports a peculiar analogy between “carrying fire” and “fighting fire”. We see images of aerial firefighting without the planes. There are just the fire-retardant chemicals in colors such as red, blue, and white inundating and spraying over deserted landscapes. Like in much of her work, Anna Vogel’s digital and manual intervention in found photographic footage is meticulous and unobvious.
In her paintings which oscillate between figuration and abstraction, Veronika Hilger (*1981) addresses classical subjects such as landscape, still life and portrait. The artist does not separate these genres clearly from each other and she does not make it easy for the spectator to decide whether he or she is standing in front of a landscape-like portrait or a landscape that appears to be a still life. Ultimately this decision is not relevant for Veronika Hilger. On the contrary, she seeks answers to fundamental questions concerning the nature and meaning of painting in its formal, technical and conceptual realization. She arranges, moves, layers and alters picture elements through a very slow painting process until the outcome feels ‘natural’ to her. In this way, nature serves to explore the processes and possibilities of painting, not the other way around. For some time, the artist is also concerned with ideas of form, materiality, perspective, color, structure and coating in a sculptural way.
