The title The Ismael Show refers to a scene in Ingmar Bergman’s famous feature film Fanny and Alexander from 1982. In an almost hypnotic clip, the gender-ambiguous character Ismael conjures up a vision for Alexander that shows the bishop’s house in flames. Ismael thus appears as an almost magical figure who can visualize what would otherwise be hidden.

In the same way, Gregor Hildebrandt is concerned with materializing the invisible, that which does not have a body or a form of appearance, in his dark paintings. Most of the works in The Ismael Show are part of Hildebrandt’s ongoing series of rip-off paintings, which present a negative form. The works are first covered with a kind of double-adhesive tape and then painted with a fixing agent on selected parts of the canvas. Subsequently, VHS or cassette tape is applied in long strips and removed again, so that only its surface remains on the work as a print.

Hildebrandt’s works most often refer to popular cultural products such as films or music, which are often physically present in the works in the form of cassette tapes, filmstrips, or vinyl records. He is interested in the idea that what normally does not have a physicality – the poem, the music, or the moving images – can be transformed into pure materiality on large canvases or in sculptures. Here, the music or film is hidden in the work, like a secret that is both inaccessible and completely physically present. The often dark and romantic universes of music, as we find them in David Bowie, The Cure, or Einstürzende Neubauten, are translated into surfaces, also dark, enigmatic, and yet filled with poetry.

In the last room of the exhibition, the dark basic tone is broken by two sculptural works whose color palette points to the signature colors of the Italian designer Pucci. The sculptures look like a kind of columns, where closed shells tower up on top of each other. The first shells were bent vinyl records that Hildebrandt bought at a flea market, where they were sold as bowls. He then continued to shape more using random records as well as records he had pressed with the album from the Grzegorzki Record label. A kind of doubly processed readymades, where the immaterial music now functions as containers for other things – or assume new sculptural meanings, while their secret remains intact.

Gregor Hildebrandt (b. 1974, Bad Homburg, DE) graduated from the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin in 2002. He has recently had solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Rostock, Kunsthalle Praha, Mies van der Rohe Haus as well as at the galleries Perrotin and Almine Rech. Hildebrandt lives and works in Berlin.

Text: Louise Steiwer