Annabell Häfner
Annabell Häfner is one of the most exciting emerging female artist positions in the country. Her works deal conceptually with the experiences of ephemerality and speed in our modern, globalized world. For the first time, abstract landscape suggestions are now moving into her current phase of work.
Architectural space is becoming increasingly vague in Annabell Häfner's more recent works, the foreground and background of the images seem to merge more and more into one entity. Through the serial repetition of the spatial motif, the locations recede in their actual functionality and architectural characteristics and become compressed fields of aesthetic experience. In a glazed application of paint with more opaque chalk overpaintings, her current body of work oscillates between definitions and omissions, hints, sometimes appearing sketchy, sometimes sharp-edged. The background of the picture defines the basic mood, the further settings arise associatively.
Text: Yeliz Kaiser
Photo ©Nicolas Böttger
Guided by an overriding interest in how ephemerality can be represented in painting, parallels to film stills emerge in terms of both form and content. The freezing of moving images manifests a transitory moment; there are blurs, vague color gradients, gaps. Last but not least, the artist conceptually deals with the idea of “non-places” – a thought construct that goes back to the French anthropologist Marc Augé. It describes identity-free functional places without a profound history, which emerge as the result of an increasingly modernized world that tends to be fleeting. In Annabell Häfner's works, these anonymous, identity-less places suddenly become hyper-surreal, highly sensitive, fictional spatial assemblages, which are potentiated in their atmospheric expression and seem to symbolize these ephemeral experiences. The canvases form a finestra aperta, but not quite in the true Leon Battista Alberti sense as perfected images of reality that allow stepping inside, but as an accurate sensory illusion of a supposed reality that seems strangely all too familiar to us and from which an immanent gravitational force runs out.
(Text: Yeliz Kaiser)
Annabell Häfner (*1993) studied from 2014-2020 at the Kunsthochschule Weissensee, Berlin in Werner Liebmann's class. In 2020-2021 she was a master student of Prof. Nader Ahriman. She was the recipient of the Mart Stam Prize 2020 and received the Artists Inside e.V. Fellowship 2020. Her works were most recently shown in the Villa Schöningen, Potsdam, in the 50Hertz tour in the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin and in the Marburger Kunstverein and are already in renowned private collections, especially in Germany and the USA.
