Gregor Hildebrandt

Gregor Hildebrandt (b. in 1974 in Bad Homburg, Germany lives and works in Berlin, Germany) makes great use of pre-recorded cassette tapes as material in his pictures and installations. The tapes are applied directly onto canvases and photographic prints and in room-sized installations. Although Hildebrandt’s work makes formal reference to Minimalism, the addition of a great number of subjective and autobiographical citations actually deliberately repudiates this strategy.

For Hildebrandt, the cassette tape as artistic medium, especially in its original function of storage medium, fulfils an important function: it enables the artist to add a further “invisible” dimension to his pictures. Playing with perception in this way is a major characteristic of his work; the picture is completed in the head of the viewer.

Accordingly, references to the work of art historical heavyweights like Robert Motherwell and Fred Sandback are of equal importance to his artistic practice as the work of Thomas Gruber, and the songs of popular musicians like Portishead and Leonard Cohen carry equal weight to the music of Paar. Freely constructing his own artistic cosmology from that which surrounds him, Hildebrandt masterfully splices and reconfigures both the material and immaterial, the personal and the collective: an invitation to dance to the music that only we can hear.