The works of Antje Hanebeck are informed by a critical approach to photography as a medium of artistic composition and, above all, as a means of giving expressive articulation to a specifically contemporary aesthetic. The focus of the artist’s work pivots on reflecting a, our, modernity, its signifiers, its myths, the unrealities of its illusory worlds. Photography serves as a point of departure thanks, no less, to its immediate, documentary facility of assimilating and depicting reality –, which it then transgresses by transforming and alienating the collected impressions in metaphorically staged presentations. The photographer achieves a subtle, different reinterpretation of content by way of collating excerpts and processing motifs: this results in photographs of potent graphic impact that challenge our perception of the present and expose it susceptibility to manipulation. In her ‘Visions’ all these icons metamorphose into abstracted emblematic compositions, into dreamlike, enraptured pictures, which permit us to peer – as if though a temporal window – into the present as past. Hanebeck masterfully disposes over all the technical refinements of her genre, which she implements with utmost sensitivity, all of which are informed by a profound knowledge of historical development: blurring, pictorial manipulation, the calculated application of “oblique” perspectives, latticework and shadow play. The concrete world of things is her partner, which is both transfigured and displaced in surreal-fantastic imaginations. Antje Hanebeck responds to those phenomenona which consistently preoccupied 20th and 21st century art, and formulates a poetic idea of what may have already past, what is, and what, perhaps, is yet to become.
Dr. Ellen Maurer Zilioli
Translation by Justin Morris
