Nic Hess - Archivo Teatral

Since the late 1990s Hess has been using industrial paint, collaged images and colored tapes, light projections and neon elements to take possession, both intellectually and in real terms, of walls, ceilings and of entire rooms. These spatial collages were based on an ar­chive of hundreds of transparencies with all kinds of logos, pictograms, images of icons from art history as well as political and economic phenomena.

In the exhibition Archivo Teatral the artist is presenting a new body of collages, which he com­­posed with the original materials of his archive.

Entering the gallery Hess welcomes us with an explosion of images, which he glued, mixed, nailed, taped and stuck to the walls of the vestibul: whales, traces of maps, illustrations of the Chinese communist party, sketches of an Alvar Aalto architecture, typologies of bottles, the banner of Juventus Turin, Tibetan sign of infinity, a poster of the Schauspielhaus Zürich. This pictorial noise abates a few steps further, when the momentum of this overture trans­forms into an elegant black line, which leads us through the exhibition like a steady musical theme. And by following this line, our silent guide, we start to understand what this exhibi­tion might be about. Hess is playing music from a global, pictorial score. His notes are the ar­chived images, which he has assembled in the last 15 years. Images which have no mea­ning and all meaning in the same moment. Images which we all do not know and do know, be­cause we all live with an inner archive of once seen icons, images, symbols, logos, and emo­ticons in a world in which the pictorial communication is about to suppress the lin­guis­tic communication. In the exhibition Archivo Teatral Hess is staging this universal archive in a rhythm of void and compression. The works he is presenting are coming to life in the mo­ment in which the simple line, the origin of all drawing, condenses in to aggregations of pic­to­rial information to contract a meaning, which is beyond the familiar meaning of the esta­blished signs.

Nic Hess (*1968) lives in Zurich and was recently seen in Berlin at the Haus Huth staging works of American abstract paintings of the Daimler Collection for the exhibition highways and byways. together again.

After single exhibitions in the Kunstmuseum Winterthur (2002), the Haus der Kunst in Munich (2004), the Venetian Fondazione Bevilacqua (2006), the Museo de Zapopan, Guadalajara, Mexico (2007), and after large wall-installations in the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles (2009) and Schloß Ringenberg (2009) he did large scale interventions for the Daimler Collection in the Mercedes Benz Museum in Stuttgart (2011), The Swiss Institute in New York (2012) and Städtische Galerie Wolfsburg (2013). In 2015 Hess will have a solo ex­hi­bition at the Kunsthalle Münster.

On the occasion of the opening on October 31 there will be a concert by Hermeto Zé Maria.