Jutta Haeckel: Future Echo

Düsseldorf-based painter Jutta Haeckel has accomplished a rare feat in the crowded arena of contemporary art — she has developed a style of painting that is unique. In her fifth exhibition at Hosfelt Gallery, she uses her technical breakthrough to express the uncertainty of our time.

Haeckel creates multiple viewpoints within a single painting by treating three-dimensional representation within a picture plane as fluid. Her technique reverses traditional processes of depiction: instead of drawing a line to define the outline of a form, she delineates a shape by painting the negative space around it, inverting one’s perception of foreground and background.

The effect is, as erstwhile critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, Kenneth Baker, described it, a “dreamlike quality of one image or plane of awareness bleeding or burning through another, a sensation available only to memory, seldom approximated in any pictorial art.”

Haeckel believes we exist in a time of increasingly rapid change and instability. Populations are finding conventional patterns, structures, codes and rules no longer reliable. She uses ambiguity — of space, perspective and perception — as a metaphor to describe that flux, and the necessity to think elastically.

Jutta Haeckel was born in Hannover, Germany in 1972. She studied at Hochschule für Künste, Bremen, Germany and Goldsmiths College, London, England. She has exhibited widely in Germany, including recent exhibitions at the Kunsthalle in Recklinghausen and at Schloss Detmold. This is her fifth solo exhibition at Hosfelt Gallery.