Galerie Max Hetzler is pleased to present recent works by Paris based German artist Regine Kolle. This is Regine Kolle's first solo show in Germany.
Kolle's work is equally engaged in two different media: painting and film animation. These do not compete but correspond to each other: some of the topics and figures are retraceable in either of her artistical ways of expression and are alternatively developed in both medias.
The initiation often goes back to an image that was just snapped up somewhere. This can be personal remembrance or thoughts, everyday occurences, TV pictures, logos or collected magazine cut-outs. The wide spectrum of the daily flood of images (low-culture, bestsellers or screen culture) that influences us is taken up in the work of Regine Kolle. The images though are only used as models and are not copied one-to-one. The motives seem strangely familiar but one can not identify them easily – they lead to confusion and enchantment at the same time.
The figures represented are young adolescents, small girls and other beings that are bound to certain activities that determine their roles explicitly. The situations they are in let them come to their limits or let them even feel their inherent emptiness. The figures often stand frontal to the observer.
The loincloth wearing, virile and unshaved Kai-Y has become the hero-protagonist of a whole series of works. He was initially created in painting and then developed later on in Kolle's films: in all of the episodes he is doing rather banal things like taking a shower, drinking coffee, having a shirt ironed, writing a book, sleeping... Though in the last of the eight Kai-Y sequences, DOG, he appears only marginally. The plot is limited to the everyday life of a dog in a house, whose windows do from time to time allow glimpses of Kai doing his laps.
Composing her works, Regine Kolle recurs to the use of pasty colours with expressive gestures and sometimes to reduced but outlining and floating brushed lines that remind us of vector drawings. Likewise one can find flat forms in her paintings that seem to be done with felt-tip pens.
The English titles of her paintings and films could also be titles of movies or songs, as well as the names of her invented heros could be names out of TV-, comic- or manga series. The exhibition title I'm so green has its origins in a songtitle of the Cologne band CAN.
Regine Kolle, born in Cologne in 1967, has been living in Paris since ten years. She was holder of a scholarship at Villa Medici in Rome (2000/01) and studied at Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Nîmes from 1988 to 1993. The monograph Garage (Editions Epithème) was published in 2004.
Forthcoming exhibitions:
Arturo Herrera
September 9 – October 29, 2005
gallery space Holzmarktstraße
Leonardo Drew/ Kara Walker
September 9 – October 22, 2005
gallery space Zimmerstraße