Jutta Haeckel: Golden Thread

Opening reception for the artist: Saturday October 22, 3-5 pm

German painter Jutta Haeckel’s subversive artworks invert the act and purpose of painting—both materially and subjectively.  Beginning with jute as her substrate—much thicker and rougher than standard canvas—she frays it by removing some of the threads. This opens the weave and allows her to extrude paint from the back, thus physically merging paint, image and surface.  In addition, through her process of accumulating material and form, she disguises the representational sources of her subjects. In confounding the viewer's experience she creates an opportunity for reinvention.

Constantly exploding conventions, Haeckel’s paintings simultaneously disclose and deceive, their multilayered colors and swirling or grid-like designs revealing whispers of lost meaning. She draws content from visual markers intended to inform, instruct, or identify. Yet the maps, fingerprints, and circuit boards she depicts transform into abstracted patterns and their purpose evaporates.

Haeckel studied with Karin Kneffel and Katharina Grosse and credits their vastly different approaches to painting with her own fascination with the medium’s possibilities.  She notes:

“I don't believe that everything is already accomplished, I think evolution is always possible. It starts with just a little variation and suddenly it could become something new or unique.  This is why I always force myself to search for the boundaries of painting and the boundaries of the materials I am working with.”

There is a deep urgency to Haeckel’s paintings, a sense that the borders and boundaries she’s pushing against might give way at any moment.  As she extends and expands the construction and content of painting, she calls into question the nature of art itself and dares to reimagine what is possible—in art as well as life.