HELLE JETZIG | REALITIES

February 2 – March 4, 2006

Brilliantly shining colors, glossy varnished surfaces, different photographic subjects, views and perspectives, photographic stencils: a mysterious maze of shapes and colors, which come together to almost surreal scenarios, to spherical, glowing visions of cities. These are unmistakable works of Helle Jetzig. What makes them unique is a special, own developed technique, a very time and energy-consuming working process, which the artist simply calls: painting and silk screen on black and white photography.

Jetzig's subjects are the big cities. For this exhibition he has mainly used shots of New York, his preferred model. Since 2004 he has also been working on a broad European cycle called  "Die Alte Welt" (The Old World), comprising various European cities and sites, of which he will present his actual paintings on Milan photography.

But neither of these works are true images of the cities, even if they can undoubtedly be perceived. Neither do the shiny colors correspond to natural reality, nor do the paintings show illustrations of real existing places. The photos are montages of different subjects, and the transparent painting, though using the photo like a structure or sketch, develops freely and intuitively, is pure painting without consideration of any subjects. Color silk screens, which seem to swim between the layers of varnish, increase the impression of a view into artificial, almost magic worlds.

Thus making visible that they are only illusions, the paintings reveal the artist's matter of concern: the question of reality, which also always means searching for the truth. Their exeptional quality is that they not only represent, but are this search. Helle Jetzig creates different picture realities and lets them question each other: the representational, and at the same time indisputable abstract character of black and white photography, the silk screen, the intensification of this abstractness as a graphical sign for reality, the concrete presence of the varnish, the abstract painting, and not at least the color itself, that claims to be its own reality. Helle Jetzig makes these elements grow  together to a new  entirety of fascinating beauty.

(Regina Boeker, December 2005. Ms. Boeker is a writer and art historian)

Helle Jetzig was born in Germany where he currently resides. He has studied art at the University of Osnabrück and has exhibited extensively throughout Europe. This is his first solo show with Kashya Hildebrand gallery in New York.