GREGOR HILDEBRANDT

Gregor Hildebrandt’s artistic practice, developed over two decades, integrates analogue media –such as cassette tapes, vinyl records, and VHS tapes – often using them as core elements of his installations and paintings. His use of cassette tapes, in particular, becomes a poetic tool for ‘charging’ his paintings with specific music pieces, films, and literary references, creating a synesthetic experience where the visual, auditory, and emotional converge. The artist’s primary ‘rip-off’ technique involves adhering the magnetic coating of cassette tapes onto canvas, pressing over them with a brush or roller, and then removing the tapes to leave behind distinct, scattered lines that appear as both positive and negative images. Although Hildebrandt identifies as both a figurative and abstract painter, his work resonates with movements like Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, Conceptualism, Fluxus, and Arte Povera. Through his use of movies, music records, and literature, the artist explores themes of memory, time, and cultural history, evoking viewer participation through cultural associations, imagination, and collective memory. For Hilderbrandt, art is not just an aesthetic pursuit but also a means of shaping the past, memory, and emotions. This interplay between past and present lies at the heart of his practice, rendering the work not only visual but tactile, and exploring the tension between absence and presence, sound and silence. In doing so, the artist gives voice to the unseen and unheard.