red offering, 2017, mulberry tree paper, ink, watercolour;
under the roof of your mouth, 2014, clay;
voidong tongues, 2017, plaster, ink;
Übergang, 2014/15, 42 a3 papers, pencil;
tongues 1,2, 2016, letter-sized paper, ink;
trigramme, 2015, pencil;
markings, 2016 letter-sized paper, ink
project space of the White House Gallery, Lovenjoel, Belgium
invited by Philippe Van Cauteren, 10 september - 12 november 2017
along the exhibition the edition Übergang has been published by hemel press
Words are doers and language is a shaky scaffolding for attaching meanings. In your exhibition I am still in the woods (Kunstverein Ahlen, 2006) I was already silenced by your work. Now, eleven years later, little of this distrust has been dispelled. Fortunately art itself is a language I have more confidence in. This is because it has the ability to explore reality without restriction. red offering is an exhibition of rare, restrained beauty. Using a minimum of materials, it explores surfaces, boundaries, transitions, hollows, changes and movements. Take the work Übergang for example. Forty-two sheets of paper suspended in a grid form a perfect rendering or imprint in graphite of the wooden floor of your home. The work becomes an inventory of lines and bands, a plan of time and space. The drawings are like a fragile trace of time lived. Behind the seeming simplicity of Übergang skulks an enigmatic layering in which personal, art-historical and literary elements are interwoven. The relationship between space, body and memory is explored, and this is a constantly recurring element in the work. Each work by Heide Hinrichs is a personal exploration of forms and materials whereby the surroundings and the body form the radius of action. The drawing is a starting point or the sketch of an idea. But the drawing is also the result of an action, of a way of being. The work is precarious, analogue, delicate, personal, direct, tactile, readable and unexpected. Perhaps now and then its simplicity makes the unendurable reality manageable. This exhibition is a new bit of something that can be interpreted as an oeuvre, one characterised by the nerve to moderate the complex reality around us with simplicity and precision. We no longer need language as scaffolding. Heide Hinrichs' intuitive conceptual work is a foundation out of which a new language can be devised.
Philippe Van Cauteren, Carves, 23 August 2017
