Beate Höing

“meet me there”

sculture and paintings

February 15th –  April 3rd 2020

opening reception: February  14th 6 – 9pm

Beate Höing—inspired by the ornamental and the textural material used in the cultural-historical folk art of fairy tales and myths as well as of traditions and rituals—took up these influences in her painting and ceramic work. Out of them she has created her own autonomous iconography. Hereby already inherent,associated and recollected images come together in an ambivalent game of reality and fiction where dreams and nightmares, relief and dread lie side by side. Materiality and form are thus inseparably linked. Furthermore the artist’s oil paintings and ceramic sculptures, including her installations, tell of a passion for the beauty, the delicacy and the aesthetics of things as well as of a playful lust for all innate possibilities.

Beate Höing’s paintings present a world of images based on photographic sources from the 1970s and 80s. The intimacy of the moment is recorded piecemeal. A further work series depicts “headdresses”, also in oversized formats. The pictured motifs at first seem to be drawn from a cozy world or from a documentation of bygone days. This peaceful idyll is deceptive, however, and a second glance also reveals the world’s ambivalences and doublespeak.

All of which is likewise true for her ceramic works that, as an independent medium, are engaged in interaction with painting. The ceramic material indirectly calls up a suspicion of kitsch, but also of traditional craftsmanship. This “loan” counteracts the content-related statement that the artist almost provocatively intensifies. The incorporation of bric-a-brac and porcelain figures—for centuries the embodiment of bourgeois taste, loved as decorative itemsor souvenirs or dismissed as kitsch—offer adequate space for the imagination and the fantastic. Maidens and youths, fairy-tale and fabled creatures or animals asleep or dreaming: these fragile figures grow out of floral and opulent pedestal elements, stand on their own, present themselves in figural arrangements, or asroom-high, wall-filling installations.

Beate Höing’s works cast a very poetic, at times ironic, glance onto the past, tell of nostalgic memories, of dreams and surreal worlds, complete with a whimsical twinkle of her eye.

Jutta Meyer zu Riemsloh M.A.

From the German by Jeanne Haunschild