Toulu Hassani: Interference

Toulu Hassani has always been driven in her artistic work by a search for the big picture, which she then captures in detail or associatively, using select subjects and methods from the realms of painting and installation. In doing so, she often abstracts scientific models she has consulted and, in combining various methods and abridgments, opens up new perspectives to the complex interrelationships of our living realities. Her third solo exhibition at Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle focuses on her fascination with celestial bodies and the physical properties of stars, which have repeatedly cropped up in her work over the years. 

For her new six-part work series Oh Be A Fine Girl Kiss Me, the artist manipulated a photograph of the night sky above her studio and transferred details of the result in oil onto six medium-format canvases. The systematically arranged constellation images are surrounded by abstracted graphic representations of stellar spectra she rendered in an airbrush technique. One of the works shows the night sky in its entirety. The graphic models are based on the pioneering work of a team of nineteenth-century American women astronomers at the Harvard College Observatory, who managed to classify and catalog different types of stars using photography. The title Hassani has given this series is also a nod to the so-called “Harvard Computers.” It served as a mnemonic device for the classification of stars. Each initial letter stands for the brightness or chemical composition of a star.

Other small-format airbrush works on view in the show have also been inspired by the Harvard astronomers’ working methods. For these works, Toulu Hassani recycled older photocopies of her mural Minus Something and transferred them, stencil-like, onto a starry background. One of the copies originally showed shadows and light incidences that resembled photographs of the formation of stars. The stencils were arranged at times as positives, at times as negatives, at others overlaid—a principle we know from some of the artist’s earlier cast works.

In addition to these two work series—in the artist’s familiarly sensuous, poetic style—the show features two recent grid paintings in oil. The exhibition showcases, in a particularly striking way, the broad spectrum of Hassani’s artistic, meticulous work as well as her perpetual love for experimentation and the combination of new and old techniques.

Toulu Hassani studied at HBK Braunschweig University of Art until 2012, including in the master class of Walter Dahn. Since then she has received several grants, including this year’s Marianne Defet Painting Scholarship in cooperation with Kunsthalle Nürnberg. In 2016, Hassani won the Sprengel Prize for Visual Art from the Niedersächsische Sparkassenstiftung, which was awarded in conjunction with a solo exhibition at the Sprengel Museum Hannover. In 2017, she had a solo exhibition at Rudolf-Scharpf-Galerie at Wilhem Hack Museum in Ludwigshafen. In 2019, her work was featured in the big group exhibition Now! Painting in Germany Today, which toured four German museums. In 2020, she was nominated for the Böttcherstrasse Bremen Art Prize and was part of the exhibition of the same name in Bremen.