Helene Appel

SELECTED WORKS BY Helene Appel

Helene Appel
Tender Leaf Salad

2008

Oil on linen

220 x 183 cm

Helene Appel
Untitled

2008

Oil on linen

220 x 147 cm

Helene Appel
Untitled

2008

Oil on linen

220 x 160 cm

ARTICLES

Helene Appel (*1976 in Karlsruhe, lives in London) brings painting into an unexpected proximity with the domestic realm, and there allows it to work subtle destruction. The unhomely hearth-ghosts she calls up disempower the mighty Action heroes of painting with beguiling guerrilla techniques.

Often large sized and sparsely composed, Helene Appel's oil paintings seem to refer to Action painting, gestural painting and informel. The viewer is seduced by linear, cyclical and rhythmical strokes and marks. However, that which appears to have conjured up the informel, a display of paint in all its guises, impasto, glazes, or dry porous marks, is, on stepping closer, recognisable as a set of depicted objects, assigned to perform precise pictorial functions. The Fontana like slits are actually twigs, an expressive configuration of green splodges is actually a cluster of leaves.

Lucio Fontana mistrusted the production of painting after painting with its assumed equivalent production of insight; he escaped the out-dated pictorial forms by expanding the surface. Jackson Pollock believed that with his drip paintings he had overcome the traditional conventions of painting, by creating a new immediacy between his own sensibility and the artistic method. Helene Appel eludes both: illusionistic depiction irritates the immateriality of expanded pictorial space and defers the acting out of sensibility into esoteric realms. Depictions of tender twigs, salad leaves laid out as if after washing, and swept together crumbs seek to lure the pretensions of the male heroes of art history into absurdity, confusing the stern formal discussions. It is precisely the smallest of these subjects, the tiny crumbs of household waste, that reveal the most significant themes in Helene Appel's paintings: the moment of choosing what stays or what goes, the granting of value to (pictorial) objects, or its removal and their invalidation. The paintings detail an economic process, of disintegration, separation, re-inclusion and re-use. The "salad writing" in particular intricately plays on the performative act of painting and the scriptural poetic that stand close to the Informel: the performativity that is bound to the body, and the écriture that stands for the crossing out of the subject combine in Helene Appel's carefully arranged objects into a literal commentary.

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Source: acgebbers.com