Opening:
Tuesday, September 23,2008, 7 pm

Duration:
September 24 – November 7, 2008
Monday – Friday, 9 am to 8 pm

In her work Annegret Hoch combines the expressive strength of colored painting with the severe clarity and reduction of minimalistic representations. In the process she undogmatically negotiates between two seemingly opposing positions in art.

On a trip to the United States Annegret Hoch came across a sentence in the writings of the American painter, Agnes Martin (1912-2004), that impressed her greatly. Martin writes, "I would like to paint the horizon without limit." Both the idea of an unlimited imagined space and its simultaneous finiteness because of real conditions resonate in her formulations. On the same trip and in search of an affordable surface to paint on, Annegret Hoch stumbled upon a roll of wallpaper that, in its own way, accommodated the idea of an endless drawing. Annegret Hoch began to experiment with the idea of infinite landscape lines in her both colorful and reduced painting.

In her painterly reaction to selected patterns Hoch adds a specific gesture to their regularity and identical structures. Individual patterns, which she discovers in wallpaper, are extracted - as in the series "weiterzeichnen" (continue to draw) - and transferred into painting. An autonomous form is thus created out of arbitrary decoration.

In her installations and wall paintings she additionally creates a relationship between her work and architectural space. Regarding her materials and painting instruments, Hoch decided against employing the traditional heroic gestures of painting - the monumental canvas, heavy oil paints and the select, high-quality painting tools. Instead she works with paper and patterned surfaces she has found that she then encroaches upon with her painting. Her surfaces are created out of such things as used roof battens and pieces of fabric. She can create the egg tempera paints she uses at anytime.

By reducing her paintings, Annegret Hoch limits herself to and concentrates on the essential. The motif of the horizontal line, found formats and patterns - which she discovers on wallpaper and fabric - and the ornamentation of Baroque ceiling decoration are the catalysts, or as Hoch refers to them, the provocations to paint, for her artistic interactions.

Annegret Hoch

Biography

Annegret Hoch was born in 1969 in Cham in Upper Palatinate. After studying at the École des Beaux Arts in Clermont-Ferrand in France, she studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. In 1999 she was the master pupil of Professor Jerry Zeniuk and she completed her studies in 2000. That same year she studied at the Chelsea College of Art and Design in London, where she received her Master of Arts in 2001. Annegret Hoch has been honored with numerous prizes and scholarships, including the Neumüller-Stipendium der Stadt Regensburg in 1992 and the annual DAAD fellowship for London in 2002. In 2004 she was awarded a sponsorship from the Erwin und Gisela von Steiner-Stiftung and received the Kahnweilerpreis for painting. In 2007 she was awarded the Bayerischer Kunstförderpreis. Her residence at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in the United States in 2003 was followed by the USA Fellowship from the Bavarian State Ministry for Science, Research and Art in 2008.