Letter: to Heide Hinrichs

Words are doers and language is a shaky scaffolding for attaching meanings. In your exhibition I am still in the woods (Kunstverein Ahlen, 2006) I was already silenced by your work. Now, eleven years later, little of this distrust has been dispelled. Fortunately art itself is a language I have more con dence in. This is because it has the ability to explore reality without restriction. red offering is an exhibition of rare, restrained beauty. Using a minimum of materials, it explores surfaces, boundaries, transitions, hollows, changes and movements. Take the work Übergang for example. Forty-two sheets of paper suspended in a grid form a perfect rendering or imprint in graphite of the wooden oor of your home. The work becomes an inventory of lines and bands, a plan of time and space. The draw- ings are like a fragile trace of time lived. Behind the seeming sim- plicity of Übergang skulks an enigmatic layering in which personal, art-historical and literary elements are interwoven. The relationship between space, body and memory is explored, and this is a con- stantly recurring element in the work. Each work by Heide Hinrichs is a personal exploration of forms and materials whereby the sur- roundings and the body form the radius of action. The drawing is a starting point or the sketch of an idea. But the drawing is also the result of an action, of a way of being. The work is precarious, ana- logue, delicate, personal, direct, tactile, readable and unexpected. Perhaps now and then its simplicity makes the unendurable reality manageable. This exhibition is a new bit of something that can be interpreted as an oeuvre, one characterised by the nerve to mod- erate the complex reality around us with simplicity and precision. We no longer need language as scaffolding. Heide Hinrichs’ intui- tive conceptual work is a foundation out of which a new language can be devised.

Philippe Van Cauteren, Carves, 23 August 2017