Anne Hefer – Oil Painting
My work
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In 1985, the charismatic Joseph Beuys announced his radically new understanding of art in the form of a manifesto. Accordingly, painting had become obsolete for him, indeed, in his view, a downright mistake. Beuys found new ways in the performing arts with happenings, installations and political campaigns.
So far so good.
But what I would like: to remember and at the same time to depict the present. This includes visual reminders. Sometimes I just want to get a piece of the sky from Guardi into the picture – with all respectful consideration of the distance – or play with the ambiguous codes of ship and seafaring in CD Friedrich. My means of expression for this is painting – still. It is the beauty of oil painting that, charged with tradition, has not yet exhausted its potential and that drives me and inspires me again and again.
Each image is a departure into the unknown, an opportunity to transform thoughts and emotions. Playing with color, reality turns into fiction and imaginary into reality, almost in secret.
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About my work
Monika von Wilmowsky
Compared to nature, Anne Hefer's paintings always remain abstract. One is reminded of the words that Paul Gauguin addressed in a letter to his French painter friend Émile 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 more of the act of creation.”
Anne Hefer deliberately avoided committing herself to specific image interpretations. Rather, everything remains an irritating mystery. We see hints of the possible; As echo chambers, so to speak, these works allow very individual answers to the question of content, determined by one's own experiences and memories. What the painter wants is to keep an open mind – as Hölderlin once put it: "Come on! That we see what is open, that we seek what is our own, no matter how far it may be.”
Ariane Hackstein
“... chimera-like visions arise, I experience unfamiliar images with a familiar feeling. Images of art history come to mind, I think of seascapes, rocky coasts, landscapes such as those found in 17th century Dutch painting ... or early 19th century English painting. But even these are only impressions, analogies of the compositions, comparable structuring of surfaces and rhythmic structures. ... Any attempt to explain the chimeras is a contradiction in terms. The theme is pure painting, an artistic struggle for design in an exemplary space. A painting that appears to be in the preliminary stage, in the process of becoming an objective image. Anne Hefer does not paint landscapes, but she transforms and assimilates corresponding pictorial traditions..."
Florian Illies
"That's probably what makes the eternal magic of the view into the clouds:
that they are like a mirror to us. And they give us a moment more perfect
timelessness. The difference between nature and art is suspended for a moment
... There is no yesterday in [painting], only today.”