ERRANT GUEST
Martha’s Garden – Hildegard Skowasch
Strange beings and things enter the stage and populate the walls. And as if on a stage, the figures are a counterpart to us, close and far, alien and familiar. Like sensitive exponents of our shared time, they express something that is (still) held in the unconscious. What we see relates – also – to what is formless, to the off-stage of every presentation. Hildegard Skowasch’s figures are staged as something entering the picture from somewhere and are brought to emotional fullness that also captures the moment of the shift, the traversing of a threshold. The power of imagination spins out the scenes, the encounters, and the rich, polyphonic conversation that dominates among the structures. In seeing, a different-seeing happens. In this show room, another invisible space is always also alluded to, from which the figures first extricate themselves in order to stage themselves by entering a mobilizing event. The point here is imagery itself, its dissolving fantasy, its wildness and freedom. Hildegard Skowasch confidently processes various influences from art history. Pop Art, inspired Minimalism, Art brut, and a subversive Surrealism enter into unforeseen liaisons here. Here the high and the low, the wise and the naive converge, join together, pledge their troth, and connect with each other.
The objects launch a Ping-Pong of give and take, of a mutual enrichment of the differing vocabularies, and thereby a many-layered seeing that doesn’t come to an end. Figuration and abstraction, the large and the small, frontal and bird’s-eye view, brilliant or opaque coloration and form, and wall and floor play with and into each other. Here, facticity, materiality, and imagination become simultaneous aspects of perception. Here, a world between entrenched categories is tried out and discovered: the actuality, but also the poetry of the material and thereby the preconditions of what appears. Seeing becomes a free play of centrifugal forces that repeatedly enables new bridge building and counterstrikes between the various things. The figures and figurations appear in and as wondrous constellations. In vital metamorphoses in Hildegard Skowasch’s oeuvre, the customary oppositions between sculpture and color, surface and space, body and skin shift from one to the other and fuse to become energy sources in her pictorial works.
With an enthusiasm that ignores boundaries, with ingenuity, wit, and deeper meaning, these figures explore rules and chance, the idea and its execution, and the counterplay between opulent diversity and rigor. Found objects and made objects, calculation and improvisation meet in this being, play together, and win something surprising, disconcerting, enchanting. Hildegard Skowasch’s work is also a stance toward unforeseeable togetherness. It thereby places itself in the interstices between thinking and acting, between what is thought up, on the one hand, and created through action and felt, on the other; it is process, play, openness, an opening. These sculptural montages live from shifting back and forth between order and disorder, transposing opposites into a field of tension. They subvert the boundaries between high and low, between carnivalesque anarchy and precise form. Completely different things, the banal and the comical mutate in Hildegard Skowasch’s oeuvre to become an iconography all its own. All the components contribute, willfully and sometimes obstreperously, to the picture’s conception and development. These works do not eliminate contradictions; they create and carry out ambivalences. Despite the plethora of associations that arise when one encounters the sculptures, a peculiar, dignified distance is inherent in the works, an aura of abstract indeterminability.
A gaze into Martha’s Garden is a gaze into a polyphonic ensemble that simultaneously explores and illuminates the multifarious relationship between imitation and imagination, between closeness and distance, and between the interior and the exterior of the pictures. In addition, the staging is also a journey by the artist into the region that connects her with her family history. On her father’s side, her family comes from the village of Wójtowo, near Olsztyn in East Prussia. After World War Two, the family settled as distant guests in unannexed Germany, but like so many evacuees, they cherished the memory of their homeland. Hildegard Skowasch remembers this region as a strange, almost unreal place, conveyed and brought to life in narratives and stories. The exhibition Martha’s Garden is thus also a reflection on sites of memory and the recollections that are tied to the fate of her family. As in the arena of memory, in these works, what is real is modalized when forming completes the incomplete and the complete is burst open again to become a fragment
Scurrying past and flaring up, immobilizing and bursting open – these are the pairs of opposites that Walter Benjamin offers as the ways history is experienced and treated, and this experience is as if illuminated once again in Hildegard Skowasch’s constellations. The remembering selection from the stock of memories and the forming of the fleeting images of memory combines the Ars Memoria with the Ars Combinatoria and at the same time emphasizes the creative and inventive character of such pictorial performances, whereby here Memoria is not grasped as a technique of memorization, but as Vis, as the power of the transformation of remembering. We gaze into a space of memory that stages the various players in the ensemble of memorabilia, holding their assets open. "The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations. There is properly no simplicity in it at one time, nor identity in different; whatever natural propension we may have to imagine that simplicity and identity. The comparison of the theatre must not mislead us. They are the successive perceptions only, that constitute the mind; nor have we the most distant notion of the place, where these scenes are represented, or of the materials, of which it is composed."2 In memory, in remembering, a membrane, a sheet of parchment, a skin connects parting, vibration, and permeability.
Every object is then like the solidification of an image from memory, a compact item that falls into reality as if from a dream and that dissolves humdrum reality. Such pictorial structures poke holes in reality; they reveal conflicts, transformations, deformations, and the forming of what was already formed, from which the form crystallizes. But precisely through that, the form connects with its context, with its space. Playful and free, stringent and polymorphous, improvising, and taking up different media, Hildegard Skowasch’s mise-enscène rebelliously eludes the either-or and the one-way streets of determinations, dances over seeming or actual contradictions.
For Hildegard Skowasch, the body and physicality are the meaning and starting point. The tactility and tangibility of the ceramic, plaster, or wooden objects allows us to feel something that escapes our eyes. Seeing and feeling, corporeality and intellectuality thereby combine. "We must habituate ourselves to think that every visible is cut out in the tangible, every tactile being in some manner promised to visibility, and that there is encroachment, infringement, not only between the touched and the touching, but also between the tangible and the visible, which is encrusted in it, as, conversely, the tangible itself is not a nothingness of visibility [...]"3
In all the energetic presence of these objects, seeing outward unfolds at the same time through a "living interaction in itself".4 In seeing outward, we also observe what is not visible, which always reconstructs itself anew, takes form, and becomes three-dimensional again in transformation. And vice versa: in the visible world, what is not material but viewed by the soul holds its surprising rendezvous.5 This exhilarating exceeding of things and the respectively completely physical anchoring in the things of this world rule in Hildegard Skowasch’s oeuvre. The double movement brings together very disparate qualities. Haptics and optics, people who perceive by touch, sight, or imagination come together and reveal what are unknown, still unrecognized factors of life.
In her meandering oeuvre, Hildegard Skowasch unfolds a "cryptography that counts out nature and at the same time deciphers the soul, that sees the material in the foldings and reads the soul in the folds."6 Then it is fitting that their faces take on shape in the contour, and yet something happens in the points of the eyes that reflects and broadcasts the world. Her face display and hide, oscillating between face and mask, and yet are the site where emotions are depicted and carried out in the animated contour
"The deepest thing in man is his skin."7 The paper skins that enclose Hildegard Skowasch’s sculptures, too, share this paradox. They veil and unveil, are fragile, vulnerable, and elastic. The depth of feeling, of sensing and suffering, comes to the surface and embodies itself. At the same time, the papers are the ground for painterly encroachments, for released brushstrokes. In all corporeality, the surface then becomes a happening, the site of meaning and expression, whereby the surface is already a transcendent field: the skin as a special kind of surface that forms the beginning of the world and at the same time the boundary of the self. Here, gathering folds and puff pleats form; the paper can fiddle, tousle, balloon, bulge, or crinkle and becomes the image carrier of our senses,8 letting sense meet with anthropomorphic sensuality. Some of the figures expand by means of bizarre equipment or by stretching their limbs into the space, acting and interacting.
Along with the objects and the sunken faces of the monotypes, which often extend into the world by means of intimated, out of place devices, appears the ornamental frieze Martha’s Garden, on which plants, tendrils, geometric forms, lines, and colors intertwine, held by the pattern inserted into the confusing diversity. The metamorphic principle of nature, which
Goethe thought could become a cipher and an exemplar of pictorial activity per se, becomes clear. Then the point is the wondrous processes of adaptation, experiment, transition, development, and the dynamic changing of forms, situations, and functions. The gaze leaps from the individual pictures to the ensemble, gets lost, and finds its way back. The tondos, too, try out diversity and unity. Gladdened by the rich flora of the flowery alpine meadows, Hildegard Skowasch developed a repertoire of individual parts of plants that she cut from linoleum and whose forms can be combined in ever-new ways. The endless possibilities of combination touch upon the endless potentials for transformation inherent in nature itself: law and appearance, simplicity and multiplicity in ever-new unity. The plant world’s wealth of variation encounters a new order in this very willful herbarium. And as in many systems of order, the word joins the image – not as a meager description, but as associative, poetic expansion. Repetitions as variation, sequence, modulations, and endless loops result also through and in the pictorial syntax of the word and sentence structures on the wall, from letters that spell out a beginning, origin, and ground where none exist. It is words, "doing as they want to do and as they have to do when they live where they have to live that is where they have come to live which of course they do do."9 Again and again, it is a wonder that 26 letters can give rise to the entire world in ever new, never ending combination of the parts, just as the objects employ, install, and combine their material in unexpected fullness.
Hildegard Skowasch’s environment creates correspondences between things that cannot be compared and stages an unfamiliarly beautiful, willful world. In the coinciding of evidence and energy, the works provide a thousand and one reasons to view along them, to see them anew, to spin forth their wonders, and to open oneself up to their inspirations.
Dorothée Bauerle-Willert
notes:
1 Carl Einstein, Bebuquin oder Die Dilettanten des Wunders, in: Carl Einstein, Gesammelte Werke, ed. by Ernst Nef, Wiesbaden 1962, p. 209.
2 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Book I, e-book produced by Col Choat and David Widger. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/4705/4705-h/4705-h.htm.
3 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, tr. by Alphonso Lingis, 1969. Accessed at https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-e&q=maurice+merleau-ponty+the+visible+and+the+invisible+pdf
4 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Zur Farbenlehre, in: Goethe, Werke, Vol. 13, Naturwissenschaftliche Schriften (Hamburg edition), Munich 1982, p. 330, translated here by M. Cohen.
5 On this, cf. James Joyce, Ein Porträt des Künstlers als junger Mann, Frankfurt am Main 1972, p. 70.
6 Gilles Deleuze, Die Falte. Leibniz und der Barock, Frankfurt am Main 1995, p. 12, translated here by M. Cohen.
7 Paul Valéry, Die fixe Idee oder Zwei Männer am Meer, Frankfurt am Main, 1982, p. 38, translated here by M. Cohen.
8 Cf. Michel Serres, Die fünf Sinne, Frankfurt am Main 1993, p. 88