BARBARA HÖLLER

In the examples mentioned above, Barbara Höller’s connection to the analytic painting of the 1970s becomes readily apparent. The development of Conceptual Art, with the attendant rise in intellectualized art, called for a painting that would distance itself from reigning formalisms and would bring an end to the modernist concept of painting, which was indivisibly tied to notions of authenticity, alterity and autonomy.[2] Now the objective was to pursue painting for painting’s sake, whereby its basic components were put at the center of reflection: support, ground, paint, tools. Simultaneously, representation and gesture were queried, and the complete elimination of the artist from her[3] work was propagated in view of the poststructuralist reconsideration of the issue of authorship.[4] In Barbara Höller’s work one can also find connections to fundamental aspects of Minimal Art laid down in the 1960s, such as a reduction to basic forms, a taboo against the use of illusionistic devices, a penchant for serial repetition paired with a prohibition against hierarchies, an impersonalization of the object and an anonymization of production.[5] Hence the artist, who generally works in series, decided in the 1990s to use industrially produced medium-density fiberboard – in which wood is pressed into a neutral, homogeneous material. In later series like check, section and concurrent access she also began to use aluminum panels, which offer a similarly hard and smooth surface that stands in pointed opposition to the texture and elasticity of canvas, the conventional support of painting. The distanced stance taken in the choice of support corresponds to an overall attempt to anonymize the artistic hand in the treatment of the image-object’s surface, for example through the use of drills in the series farbbohrungen, wood, riss & dry, fill, prozess and prozesssysteme, and of syringes in oneliner and stream and breath. Similar observations hold true for the work groups glasslines and marks. In the former, Höller experiments with the process of glass melting and its form-changing effects, drawing straight lines on the glass surface with a paint pen and straightedge, and then leaving the final result up to the material dynamics of glass as it melts and hardens again. In the latter, the placement of objects on canvas gives rise to photogram-like images, which, although they are captured by the artist’s hand guiding a sprayer applying acrylic paint, nonetheless form a surface so homogeneous that it provides little information on her subject.

And yet one should not understand Barbara Höller’s work, despite its strong tendency toward the geometric-concrete and the analytic, as art that caves in without reservation to the demands of the intellect. This becomes most evident in the artist’s pleasure in experimentation. Within the individual work groups one can often perceive a great deal of fuzziness and playfulness in the realization of the underlying concept. In producing her works, Barbara Höller is usually pursuing a concept, or at times a query addressed to painting as the object of investigation, and thus she at first establishes the parameters under which the experimentation will be conducted. Nonetheless, chance plays a decisive role in the creation of the individual works, either through the uncontrollable characteristics of the material used or through the participation of other artists in situations intentionally left open. In the series farbbohrungen this becomes readily apparent: minor variances in the pressure applied to the drill and the angle at which it is positioned cause the different layers of color under the surface to be revealed irregularly as “sedimentary” samplings. Although the series riss & dry or section are professedly based on systematic approaches displayed in their use of grids and linear structures, the individual works originate from formal decisions made by the artist on the spur of the moment. The series oneliner evidences a playful approach in which Höller experiments with techniques of paint application, using a syringe to apply a string of acrylic paint to a ground that is in some cases colored, whereby the varied movements of the hand guiding the syringe produces variable and in the end uncontrollable nets of lines. Begun in 2011, the farbstapel series features stacked layers of acrylic paint. It is pointedly dedicated to inexactitude, which derives from the technique used in the objects’ creation. Circular, flat color discs of acrylic paint are stacked by the artist in a half-dry state into columns of varying height, which bind together into solid bodies as they dry. At times the drying process causes their forms to deviate strongly from the ideal dimensions of the original shape. Alongside contingency of the aforementioned sort, which derives from irregularities of material and the physical influence of the artist, some of Barbara Höller’s works also provide for the participation of others, giving rise to spirited play within a framework established by the artist. The paint clothes, folded pieces of “fabric” consisting exclusively of acrylic paint in which the front and back sides meld into an object-like whole, were, for instance, stacked in the Kunsthandlungen (meaning both art actions and art stores) into sculptures variable through the participation of their beholders, with each individual result being only one of many possibilities. In charts the lengths of the spaces to be left between the individual aluminum bars in the actual installation were left up to the curator. The works concurrent access, pearl angle and loopen, all of them created in 2015, address questions arising from the intersection of real, virtual and Euclidean space while presenting themselves as paintings changeable through the playful interaction of others.