BIOGRAPHY
…chimerical visions rise, I experience foreign images with a familiar feeling. Memories of images from art history emerge, I think of seascapes such as those found in 17th century Dutch painting…or in early 19th century English painting. But these too are only impressions, analogies of compositions, comparable divisions of surfaces and rhythmic structures… Any attempt to explain the chimeras is a contradiction in itself. The subject is pure painting, an artistic struggle for design in pre image space. A painting that seems to be created in the preliminary stage, in the process of becoming a representational picture.
Anne Hefer does not paint landscapes, but she transforms and assimilates corresponding pictoral tradition.”
Ariane Hackstein
Compared to nature, Anne Hefers paintings always remain abstract. One is reminded of words of Paul Gauguin addressed in a letter to his French painter friend Emil Schuffenecker in 1888:
“ A little advice, don´t try to imitate nature, art is an abstraction; start from nature while dreaming in it, and think rather of the act of creation.”
Anne Hefer has quite deliberately avoided committing herself to certain interpretations of the picture. Rather, everything remains an irritating riddle. We see allusions to the possible; as echo chambers, so to speak, these works allow for very individual answers to the question of content, determined by one´s own experiences and memories. What the painter wants: to keep our eyes open for the open – as Hölderlin once put it:
“So come! That we look at the open, that we look for our own, as far as it is.”
Monika von Wilmowsky
CV
Solo Exhibitions (Selectio)
1998 Ernst-Rietschel -Kulturring Pulsnitz
2017 Gutshaus Steglitz Berlin
2020 Hagenring Galerie Hagen
Art Fairs (Selection
2017 Art Beijing
2017 YIA Art Paris
2019 Art¬Fair Shang¬hai Plus
2019 Red Dot Mi¬ami
2021 Pier 94 NYC
2023 Art-Expo NYC
Anne Hefer studied History of Art and German Studies at the University of Marburg and Cologne as well as at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste at Düsseldorf.
In 1977, she worked in New Mexico/USA. Besides having taken part in many exhibitions, the artist has worked constantly for the Art Magazin „Kunst“ ( Friedrich Verlag GmbH).
STATEMENT
About my work
In 1985, the charismatic Joseph Beuys proclaimed his radically new understanding of art in the form of a manifesto. According to this, painting had become obsolete for him, indeed, in his view it was downright a mistake. With happenings, installations, political actions, Beuys found new ways in the performing arts.
So far so good.
But what I want: to remember and at the same time to put the present into the picture. This also includes visual memories. Sometimes I simply want to bring a piece of Guardi’s sky into the picture – while respectfully remembering the distance – or play with the ambiguous ciphers of ship and sea voyage in C. D. Friedrich. My means of expression for this is painting – still. It is the beauty of oil painting, which, charged with tradition, has still not exhausted its potential and which drives me and inspires me again and again. Each painting is a departure into the unknown, a possibility to transform thoughts and emotions. In the play with colour, reality is transformed into fiction and the imagined into reality.
