HANS-ULRICH THEILKÄS - LONGING FOR THE HORIZON

The exhibition presented here of works by Hans-Ulrich Theilkäs (H.U.T.), born in 1949 in Erlenbach in the Simmental region of Bern, is conceived as a kind of “retrospective”: a look back at a body of work spanning 10 years, focused on the theme of landscape. From 1988 to 1998/99, H.U.T. worked exclusively with the form of the horizon line and the shape of the famous mountain panorama of the Eiger, Mönch, and Jungfrau, the Niesen, and occasionally the Stockhorn, as they present themselves to the viewer from a fixed vantage point, the so-called “Riedhubel,” a hill devoid of any myth in the Gürbetal valley of Bern. The horizon line and mountain forms as seen from this vantage point are the exclusive subject of his work. Drawings, prints, paintings, and objects document a developmental process that is still rooted in Hodler’s “mountain portraits,” but later leads to an objectified, stripped-down formal world. The theme of landscape has been the stepchild of the avant-garde since the stylistic movements of Cubism, Dadaism, Futurism, and New Objectivity. It was viewed with skepticism, if not entirely banished.

One exception was Expressionism, in whose highly emotionally charged world of form and color the themes of nature and landscape played a significant role. The naturalistic, romantic, or sublime styles that had dominated landscape painting from the Renaissance through the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries came to an end around 1900. The break was definitive, and attempts at a revival seemed artificial or outdated. It was not until Pop Art, Land Art, and Earth Art, as well as Conceptual and Process Art, emerged in the 1960s that new approaches were found to reconnect the achievements of Modernism with the theme of landscape. With Hans-Ulrich Theilkäs, one must start at two points: where the great European tradition ends, and where the aesthetics of postmodernism begin. This is roughly how his position can be situated. H.U.T., who respects tradition but does not make it his own, who uses it without identifying with it artistically, has no problem with the primary aesthetic, the naturally “sublime” aspect of the mountain panorama. The kitschy, domesticated formula of the mountains, neo-Impressionist aesthetics, but also the subjective-expressionist formal world are alien to him.

While taking nature itself as his starting point, he does not go as far as Christo or Richard Long in stripping away culturally conditioned baggage; they work directly within nature, treating nature as a given object or as a natural backdrop. Christo and Long share the approach that nature is essentially devoid of meaning, “truly” real in the Zen sense. Thus, it is reality, or a virtual space for an experiment in nature-culture or natural space versus cultural sign. Theilkäs, too, has a need for the real, for “emptiness,” and thus for artistic utility. That is why his process is twofold: it consists, on the one hand, of the perception and recording of the given at a fixed location outdoors, at Riedhubel, and, on the other hand, of the sober, material-oriented verification, (pseudo-)scientific measurement, demarcation, and determination of what has been “brought home” to the studio. The natural, by no means naively perceived reality of the horizon is formally defined and measured in the studio with the meticulousness of a natural scientist, in a concise, reduced form. H.U.T.’s formal world is limited to the horizon line and the shape of the mountains.

The color palette, based on variations of the primary colors yellow, blue, and red, resembles the geological strata of the Earth with its layers of glaze. According to H.U.T., setting boundaries accelerates development in the exploration of a purely conceptual world of form. With this kind of “restriction” of artistic means, he conceptually aligns closely with the principles of Minimal Art, an art movement of the 1960s in America. Upon closer inspection, one also discovers a strong kinship with the British artist Hamish Fulton, who likewise distinguishes between the process of perception in nature and the process of a minimalist, abstracted transfer of form (cf. the “Mountain Skyline” from a hike in northern India in 1984: a simple, black horizon line on an interior wall, or works based on “walks” in 1988 and 1993 in Japan and Italy, where the artist reduced impressions of Mount Fuji and the Dolomites to their most essential form: the horizon line).

H.U.T.’s points of contact with individual artists or movements stem less from a conscious decision than from a consistent, intuitive engagement with the question of what is—or is not—feasible in art today with regard to landscape. In any case, his approach appears minimalistic and conceptual: rather than seeking originality, he draws in part from reflections on what already exists in art—the formal worlds of Ferdinand Hodler, Paul Klee, and Paul Cézanne. (Some of these interests have been realized; others are only just coming into view.) He succeeds in integrating foreign elements into his own work or, in formal terms, “staging” them. This complex yet not incomprehensible artistic process is now to be illustrated in the concise but representative exhibition of his works, created in collaboration with the artist.