Annabell Häfner: Room with a view
Annabell Häfner is one of Germany’s most exciting emerging artists. We are pleased to present her first solo exhibition at Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle, featuring works that conceptually examine the experiences of ephemerality and the fast-paced nature of our modern globalized world. Her current work phase is the first to see abstracted scenic allusions enter the picture.
The architectural space grows less and less concrete in Annabell Häfner’s more recent works. Back- and foreground seem to merge increasingly into a single entity. The serial repetition of the spatial motif pushes the actual function and architecture of places to the back, where they become compression fields of aesthetic experience. In glazed paint applications with opaque overpaintings in chalk, her current work complex oscillates between definition, omission, and allusion, appearing in part sketchlike, in part sharply contoured. The background determines the basic mood, other elements emerge associatively.
Annabell Häfner is one of Germany’s most exciting emerging artists. We are pleased to present her first solo exhibition at Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle, featuring works that conceptually examine the experiences of ephemerality and the fast-paced nature of our modern globalized world. Her current work phase is the first to see abstracted scenic allusions enter the picture.
The architectural space grows less and less concrete in Annabell Häfner’s more recent works. Back- and foreground seem to merge increasingly into a single entity. The serial repetition of the spatial motif pushes the actual function and architecture of places to the back, where they become compression fields of aesthetic experience. In glazed paint applications with opaque overpaintings in chalk, her current work complex oscillates between definition, omission, and allusion, appearing in part sketchlike, in part sharply contoured. The background determines the basic mood, other elements emerge associatively.
Guided by a superordinate interest in how to capture the ephemeral in painting, formal as well as thematic parallels to film stills arise. Freezing a moving image manifests a transitory moment; the result are blurs, vague color gradients, lacunae. Conceptually, the artist also deals with the idea of “non-places”—a term coined by the French anthropologist Marc Augé. It describes functional spaces devoid of identity and without any profound history that result from an increasingly modernized, accelerated world with a tendency for transience.
In Annabell Häfner’s works, these anonymous, identity-free places suddenly become hyper-surreal, highly sensitive, fictional spatial assemblages that are exalted in their atmospheric expression and appear as allegories of these experiences of ephemerality. The canvases form a finestra aperta—not quite in the original sense of Leon Battista Alberti as perfected images of reality inviting us to step inside, but rather as unerring sensory illusions of an ostensible reality that seems, curiously, all-too familiar to us and from which an immanent gravitational force emanates.
Annabell Häfner (b. 1993) studied at the Weissensee School of Art and Design Berlin in the class of Werner Liebmann from 2014 to 2020. From 2020 to 2021, she was a master student of Prof. Nader Ahriman. She is the recipient of the 2020 Mart Stam Prize and the 2020 Inside Art Fellowship. Her works were most recently shown at Villa Schöningen, Potsdam, at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, at Galerie im Tempelhof Museum, Berlin as well as at Marburger Kunstverein and are already part of acclaimed private collections, especially in Germany and the USA.
