Gregor Hildebrandt (B. 1974)

Gregor Hildebrandt uses cassettes, vinyl and videotape to create surprising conceptual works. Although he takes stylistic cues from minimalism, his use of the materials of analogue recording weights the resulting objects with a world of biographical and socio-cultural intrigue, registering his own lived experience of popular culture. He deconstructs what was once a container of audio or visual information, creating playful composite objects tinged with these now invisible collective associations. In Romy Als Poupée (in Boccaccio 70) (2010) he presents an inkjet print of Romy Schneider as Poupée, a character in ‘Il lavoro,’ the third part of Boccaccio ’70, a 1962 anthology film which deals with different aspects of modern love and morality in the episodic style of the medieval author Boccaccio. This already intertextual film is transmuted further into a referential object; the title points up the artificiality of the image, privileging equally the actress’s first name and that of the character she plays. Ribbons of Hildebrandt’s signature cassette tape reel down the image, exposing the two-dimensional picture plane and threatening rupture like worn film in an old projector. The ephemerality of the defunct medium makes poignant the image of Romy Schneider, who died young in 1982. Elliptische Platten Target (2013) employs a different use of cassette tape, forming a vinyl ‘record’ whose function has been wryly elided; the word ‘Target’ in the title highlights the ambiguity of this new hybrid object, held remote, oversized and useless, in its Plexiglas case. No longer document or entertainment commodity, this strange stand-in hovers with latent memorial overtones, imbued with an abstracted reliquary aura and uncanny beauty.