Dirimart is pleased to present Duale Systeme aus der Mauerstadt, Gregor Hildebrandt’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, which also marks his ‘premiere’ in Turkey.

Gregor Hildebrandt is a master of repurposing, renaming and reinterpretation of everyday objects and pop-cultural myths. His multi-faceted practice incorporates heterogeneous elements and references from music, film, literature and art history. The ‘paintings’ fabricated from magnetic tape, the sculptures created from specially formed vinyl, the terrazzo-like mosaics made of broken records, and the displays full of chess pieces inspired by supermarkets evoke new and sensual experiences: tactile experiences of music, painterly representations of sound, and hidden echoes of minimalistic aesthetics.

Duale Systeme aus der Mauerstadt (Dual Systems from the Walled City) – organised by the renowned Swiss curator Christoph Doswald – creates an energetic, all-over-environment that reflects the ambiguity of cultural interferences in Berlin, Hildebrandt’s hometown, as well as the globalised muzak of our times: the endless recycling of artistic themes, forms and media. The exhibition creates an associative experience in space and comprises twenty works from various series, some dating back to 2018. The focus of the precisely conceived presentation, however, lies on current works, some created explicitly for this project with Dirimart.

Gregor Hildebrandt’s most recent works are titled Prismen (Prisms). Deriving from the series of paintings made from cut records that the artist began in 2015, the Prismen combine the mosaic of the record paintings with three-dimensional geometrical structures. These expansions of sound in the space stand on a thin line between painting and sculpture, as ungraspable and present as the songs they contain. The reflection and diffraction of light, typically associated with prisms, are translated in Hildebrandt’s series into subtle shimmers that arise on the surface of the records’ grooves. Varying according to the pattern of the records’ fragments and the volume of the piece, they invite viewers to walk around them in order to grasp/apprehend/comprehend them.

Physical and sensory experiences are central to Hildebrandt’s artistic practice. He synthesises empty canvases with recorded sound or video tape that convey precise aspects and themes defined by the artist, some of which have an autobiographical background. The exhibition at Dirimart features, for example, two small paintings that, at first glance, evoke minimalist aesthetics but are based on woven patterns from dish towels that Hildebrandt found in his father’s household. The ‘paintings’ are titled with song lines by bands such as Element of Crime or singer-songwriter Konstantin Wecker, referring mysteriously to the past. In this way, the personal memory is combined with the abstract reflection, and the biographical experience roots in the cultural storage, creating echo chambers that extend beyond art. It is this ‘invisible’ dimension that lends Gregor Hildebrandt’s work a compelling energy.

Köfteci, or meatball restaurants are omnipresent on Berlin’s streets and, since Ergin Orbey’s legendary film Merakli Köfteci (The Curious Köfte Seller) (1976), have also become a pop culture icon. Based on a typical köfteci tavern sign on Potsdamer Strasse, Gregor Hildebrandt has developed a so-called cassette box that refers to the dual systems in the walled city mentioned in the exhibition title. Stacked 76 by 9 audio cassettes reanimate, as it were, a banal advertising image consisting of just as many different recorded sound packages: Tina Turner, Richard Claydermann, Richard Strauss, Gitti & Erica, Peggy March, Ravel, Tanita Tikaram, and many others form the image of globalised Turkish fast food and lay the sound carpet for a universal cultural memory. Köfteci is an impressive symbol of our lived simultaneity, a fascinating sequence of heterotopias.