GREGOR HILDEBRANDT
Perrotin Seoul is pleased to present Kraniche Ziehen Vorüber (Cranes Passing By). Returning eight years after his first solo exhibition in Korea at the gallery in 2016, the show will present the artist's recent works, including his signature series of colorful vinyl columns, as well as his use of analog music storage media like cassette tapes.
May 14 - June 29, 2024
Every morning, the artist is greeted by cranes flying overhead in the ceiling painting of his Berlin bedroom. Cranes never linger, they stay on the move; their flight determined by their constant migration from summer to winter habitats and back. The exhibition’s title refers to a 1957 film by Russian director Mikhail Kalatosov, The Cranes Are Flying, which begins in the early morning and shows an exuberant young couple in love dancing through the deserted streets of Moscow.
The work of art cannot be unseen either, but it presents itself in its entirety to the eyes of the viewer, the linearity of viewing is reserved for the gaze of the individual viewer, so each pictorial narrative unfolds individually.
Free-standing columns of colorful painted vinyl records, shaped into bowls and stacked on top of each other, pay homage to the great classic of modern sculpture, Constantin Brancusi’s Endless Column. The records’ colors mimic the striped pattern of Gregor Hildebrandt’s partner’s mother’s sweater, thus taking up private, almost intimate motifs.
Donna (2024) depicts the actress Natalie Portman wearing make-up for her role in Darren Aronofsky’s 2010 film Black Swan. It shows the path of an ambitious dancer in her self-destructive struggle to claim the antagonistic roles of the black and white swans in Piotr Tchaikovsky’s ballet Swan Lake, which dramatically escalates in hallucinatory episodes until the cadence, which deals with artistic perfection and self-destruction.
Gregor Hildebrandt’s version turns the motif from Klint’s painting on its head, her white swan is black in his painting and vice versa, but the fundamental change hardly alters the overall impression and thus emphasizes Klint’s point.
The swans were not placed over the existing inlays of the cassettes, as in the case of Donna, but were cut out directly from black and white inlays. The information on the backs of the cassettes thus remains partially visible,—in what at first glance seems like an arbitrary arrangement of titles and artist, resulting in a kind of meta-poem, full of emotional confusion, dream images and chimeras, memories and fantasies.