Philipp Haager

until 24 Feb 2024

perg_634
Asperger Str. 12
71634 Ludwigsburg

Philipp Haager creates his colorful and atmospheric paintings by building up myriad layers of ink on wet cotton or linen. These membranes capture, align, condense, and retain countless pigment particles and water droplets, binding them up in the ink. The resultant color-space paintings oscillate between luminescence and opacity, located somewhere in the nexus of Color Field, Abstract Expressionist, and Impressionist landscape painting. In their content, meanwhile, the creations picture memory and event horizons—lying on your back, gazing up, carefree, at passing clouds; sitting by the water and watching the last ray of sunshine disappear below the horizon; or marveling at the constellations of the night sky. With the help of scientific instruments such as space telescopes and electron microscopes, the works further provide views into the far reaches of our universe, unimaginably old galaxies and microscopically small matter. The tiny and particular meets the immense and endless.

Showing now PERG Gallery, Haager’s most recent paintings continue the Nearfield and Deep Field paintings series, made up of superimposed mementos including memory pictures and nebulae of postcards. Since his studies at the Städelschule in Frankfurt, the artist has given his pictures titles such as Asperg, Monrepos, and Bottwartal, popular excursion destinations in the “local recreation area” of his hometown of Ludwigsburg. The sites are depicted as motifs on countless postcards, but as such cannot reflect personal memories of and encounters with these places. The title of the exhibition, Postcards from LB, questions if postcards as an image carrier are still significant in an age defined by the exponentially growing flood of digital images. Haager posits that a painting—dedicated to a place, a certain mood there, or a person—might also fulfill this function as its installation shots are distributed, sent, and duplicated by the media through the digital world.

A limited edition of postcards with different motifs will be published to accompany the exhibition.