In the exhibition A Heady, Hefty Upload. the artist Helga Schmidhuber (*1972, Wiesbaden) shows an up-to-date survey of her work. The chosen title of the show refers to the process of the exhibition conception, which was very compressed in time and performed with great intensity. Like a „heady“ and „hefty“ stream of data, the presentation of the works for the Kunstverein’s exhibition space took shape, with some of the assembled works being even in the process of creation and now be shown publicly for the first time.
The formal scope of the show extends - quite programmatically for the artist‘s oeuvre - from large-scale gestural-figurative paintings to objects and showcases to painterly miniatures, collages and tattoos. All this, however, is based on an intimate interconnecting network of ideas and feelings. Helga Schmidhuber‘s pictorial language is fed by these recurring sources. There is, above all, nature: in its living form as well as in its scientific-graphic reproduction. In addition, everything found in everyday life plays a central role - as a visual and ideal starting point for the painterly work or directly as material in the form of painting grounds or in sculptural objects. Old printed works, partly quite profane, partly strange auratic artefacts or also fragments of it - and again the animal: skulls, bones, mussel shells, feathers. The artist sometimes uses popular folk tradition or the religious-sacral of other ethnic groups, and the depth psychology, their fantastic-dreamlike and magical-occult are constantly drawn through her works.
Finally there are the very immediate sensory perceptions of the places where the respective image ideas found their origin and so decisively shaped them. Their colors, smells and sounds flow synesthetically into the works. At the center of her Heady, Hefty Uploads is the tripartite series Petrichor. The term refers to the smell of rain on dry soil or hot stone as we perceive it when the heat of summer discharges in a thunderstorm. Complemented by some works from other groups of works such as Buben or Wenig Zeit zwischen zwei Fingern, the artworks condense into an „impetuous“ and „violent“ show: Ghostly Kattas - a lemur species from the island of Madagascar - climb through imaginary trees and take their counterpart in view. Sometimes casually, sometimes with a piercing look. A sumptuous trophy seems to float in the air, flinching and tingling with subtle energies. From pictures, showcases and shrines, mysterious fetishes and totems reveal their witchcraft. Branch forks, which once struck a tornado in the artist‘s garden, turn into massive, decorated divining rods - seismographs for the forces beyond our consciousness and the earthquake quiver.
Raising plants and meandering root systems, fantastic gelatinous deep-sea dwellers and ominous men hiding their faces behind bizarre feather masks ... All this in its splendor of colors and shapes throws back the existential question to the viewer: what are you and what do you mean, human, strangest of all mammals?
Text: Michael Neser
