Red girls 1, 2008, mixed-media sur toile, 70x90cm

« Red is the light in the time » (Rupprecht Geiger)

In “Red Girls” centre, the Cologne artist Hanne Elf’s third exposition in the Deupardieu Gallery, there is the red colour, the queen of colours.

Fire and blood’s colour, interpreted in turn in the cultures like a male or female, positive or negative colour, she is life and death, fertility and love symbol ; she’s considered as the philosopher stone first degrees.

Hanne Elf studies signification of red colour by means of very diverse techniques : sculptures, silhouettes, prints, mix-media work. But the heart of the exposure rest - as always for Hanne Elf - painting.

Her spectrum’s breadth with extends from tables telling a history to those which show a pure symphony of colour and light, until those which explore painting like visual language. She mix private and general, abstract and figurative, utilizes tales and myths with her own biography, introduced topics such as the difference of the sexes or the gender studies.

Her impulsivity and her motif choice reveal her absolute emotion.

Harald Mann

Hanne Elf : Eismitte

LIt isn't necessary to know Paul Celan and his « Fugues de mort », from which are quoted these lines, to understand Hanne Elf's work. However, the poet plays an important rôle in the network of influences and interconnections where the artist created her exhibition. And just like Celan plays with poetic matter, inspired from litterature and religion, transforming it in an intertextual way, Hanne Elf's paintings are nourrished by several sources which are superimposed and mixed, sometimes even very concretly. As she did in « Eis-Hede » or « Eis-Mond », that she composed by assembling photographs, shots at various moments, that she then covered with paint. Music plays an essential rôle for these two artists. Paul Celan entituled his poem « Fugue » a term which indicates a musical form based on the contrapuntic writing and to which some parts seem to flee in the repetition of the theme. That also impregnates this serie of paintings. The tale entituled « La petite fille aux allumettes » by Hans Christian Andersen, is the starting point of the serie « Eismitte ». This story has particularly touched the childhood of Hanne Elf, who identified with the protagonist. She therefore had the feeling of living aroundsnow and ice, of being in « the middle if ice ». The existential experience of a young girl confronting the cold weather, parable of solitude and desperation when we are in a frozen environmentt, in an emotionnal sense. The parallel with Louise Bourgeois naturally comes to mind. The artist, indeed belongs to two generations earlier, but stays in the same family environment. She declares « all my work, for the last fifty years, is inspired by my childhood. We should ban our past or accept it. If we're unable to accept it, we become an artist »

In the same way, the past takes an important place in everything Hanne Elf undertakes. However, her work translates autobiographical reasons in a comprehensible language to all. It's in her relationship with the concrete and the parabolic print, that is born a « de-subjectivisation » of the topic which effects her from an existancial npoint of view. It is at the same time concrete and abstract, subjective and objective, colored and coloreless. They are memory images, filled with affects, beauty and intensity but without its art implosing in a pure symptom. The ambivalence persists, the enigma and the value of the form. Hanne Elf manages to resurface a very intense and major memory. Several works of this serie contains texts and signs, birbes of an era in ruins. They were written in Sutterlin, a german language used until 1945, particularly by Joseph Beuys, an important Shaman originating in Niederrhein following the example of Hanne Elf. For the generations born after 1945, this writting which she approriated herself, is quite difficulte to read. It's a writting style used by the parents and the grand parents, born of the dark times of Germanies past. It seems that Hanne Elf tends to dicipher the text mentioned by Pascal Mercier, « the one the parents carved with red metal in the childrens souls », the one we spend all our life searching for and trying to understand. Hanne Elf plunges in the depth of memory and wants to transpierce the thick cover of ice of the lapse of omission and ignorance. She undertakes a task resembling the one of the research station in Antarctique, baptised « Eismitte », that she chose to take as metaphore, presented as a background in several of her works. In that station, scientifics reconstruct the past thanks to carrots taken in the imposing cap of thick ice of four kilometers. Hanne Elf undertakes as well an introspective, in order to discover herself. And it isn't a coincidence if she presents herself for the first time in « the moon of ice » (« Eis-Mond » in german, N d T). She seems to have landed on an unknown land.

« We need audacity to look at the past straight in the eyes. But expressing something, is preserving ones strengh, by taking away it's scary side. Furthermore, deceptions help us discover our real outlines » (Pascal Mercier) Hanne Elf paints to orient herself as well as to see clearly. With this intention, she fights against the demons of the past with alot of emotions, by committing her body and soul in the mission. For example, the elaboration for the master-piece « Eismitte 1 », she kneeld on the painting while mising some colors with both hands on a paper, rubbing it as though it were a washboard. Then using a penci, she exteriorized all her rage, fighting the darkness, transforming it into light. She's against the romantique representation of death in Andersen's tale, refusing it's ending. She wants to produce life and wormth, opposing to Nothing, of terrible darkness, color, and emflaming ice and coldness.

Red and white colours dominate , symbol of blood and death, fire and ice, hope and energy. Romanism learned us that painting represent happiness quest. Gerhard Richter, him, has declared that it was the most elevated form of hole.

In Hanne Elf’s painting, the two aspects are really presents.

SPUREN – TRACES

The artist Hanne Elf lives and works in Cologne and has worked out since several years a questioning around the concept of trace.

As archaeologist, she course various countries to discover testimonies of last cultures, beginning of our civilization, of birth of painting and of architecture.

In same time she makes her own traces, transform her own history, her childhood and establish a link with the actual epoch and contemporary art.

The exposition presented in Depardieu’s Gallery contains some work papers having for topic Denmark, where Hanne Elf lived and worked a few years with in particular the series entitled “Populonia” and “Caere”.

The most part of presented productions treat of Etrusques art, of their religion, their still mysterious culture.

It’s about really plastics tables which mix acrylic resin and oil with the original ground of the necropolis of Tuscany and Latium. We finds there block’s silhouette of gigantic stones, engravings and symbols of sky divination, fragments of tomb paintings, sepulchral inscriptions, Etruscan letters and the names of their god.

We can feel the atmosphere of the kingdom of deaths, at the same time alarming and carrying great hopes. For the Etrusque, death was the culminating point of the joy. Death glorification was simultaneous with the glorification of the life. The heart and the body formed a whole, death and the life was One in the cycle of cosmic unfolding.

On the basis of these primitive forms of painting and architecture, Hanne Elf undertakes research on light and darkness, colour and matters which are in fact basics research on our existence. The glance on the tombs become a transcendental glance, a new door opens in the major black of tables, a slit carries out towards the light, a new coloured life.

Hanne Elf’s works are every time at the point of crossing between concrete and symbol. She doesn’t interested her in images.

They can call with all kinds of interpretations and we can simply feel the emotion of contrasts between their extreme colours and their total darkness.

Etrusque World will be symbolised by the installation “la Balançoire” on gallery’s terrace : Guards of the kingdom of deaths, the necropolis, darkness and fire. This returns to our modest opinions and the childhood of Hanne Elf in the area of the Ruhr.

The evening of varnishing, the artist will carry out a performance in the role of a “haruspice”, the preacher and soothsayer of the Etruscans. “Haruspice” interpreted the will of the Gods by certain signs, in particular according to the examination of the entrails of the immolated animals.