Herbert Hinteregger: Untitled (Flow)

The total decelerationIt probably all started with Herbert Hinteregger’s ­(*1970) childhood dream of being able to cut a piece from the Schwarzsee, a moor lake in his Tyrolean homeland. Looking at the surfaces of his images painted with ballpoint pen ink, it becomes apparent that he has found the perfect painting medium to achieve metallike, shiny, opaque, dark blue surfaces of unfathomable depth. Ballpoint pens are highly pigmented and highly viscous in their consistency, which means they do not leave any trace of brushstrokes, while preserving the painterly blur of a seemingly perpetual flow. The ink is obtained in a long and obsessive process of draining out countless refills for ballpoint pens, and then applied to various base materials such as denim, tulle, brocade and linen. The processual nature of his working method plays an important role in Herbert Hinteregger’s conceptual painting in terms of material language, whereby the ­production process is decisively characterized by a complete deceleration, leading to a wide range of ­variations of minimal abstract compositions. The artist sometimes joins these images, with their correspond­ingly rather reduced vocabulary of forms, in expansive ­installations such as the huge »raft« presented at Taxis­palais in Innsbruck. With such forms of presentation and, of course, also with this first major monographic publi­cation, Herbert Hinteregger explores contemporary ­possibilities of painting while including, as a matter of course, any conceptual strategies of the twentieth ­century such as the role of materials, spatial references,Exhibitions:Taxispalais Kunsthalle Tirol, Innsbruck, March 4 – June 11, 2017Kunstverein Heilbronn, July 15 – September 10, 2017