In Anna Lea Hucht’s What are you doing the rest of your life?, the artist’s interest in material surfaces remains a driving force. Continuing her series of still lifes, she allows us to participate directly in the highly-charged relationship between photography and painting. Her still lifes are only recognizable as paintings upon detailed inspection, so close is their similarity to the photographic originals in black-and-white. Isolated from space and time, objects thus stand in the centre of the pictorial event where, additionally staged with a realistic interplay of light and shade, they shift the focus of the visitor onto the wholly distinctive and particular aesthetics of the world of things.
Alongside her intensive ongoing concern for objects, the artist is exhibiting four watercolors, which, inspired by the same curiosity concerning structures, examine the nature and regularity of fur. The fable-like creatures, whose faces and legs are furry, find themselves positioned opposite and in rich contrast to a watercolor of a hortus conclusus, out of which a dog stares, whose skin is not worked out in detail. In the background, however, the beholder can study the jungle-like plant world of the garden. As so often in Hucht’s oeuvre, we gaze here into a fantasy realm in which the known and the unusual are combined in a willful, idiosyncratic manner.
What are you doing the rest of your life? is on view through March 7 at Meyer Rigger Schaperstrasse 14 10719 Berlin. photographs courtesy of the gallery