Theresa Hecker

“The table is a place of encounter. We find it, in one form or another, in every culture. It is always an invitation to sit down next to each other, to exchange ideas with acquaintances and strangers, to have a drink or a meal together. It is a neutral place where we approach each other and in my work it always represents the culture of the Mediterranean region, which I got to know thanks to an Erasmus stay in Rome. For a few years now, ‘The Table’ has been my mindset for work. We encounter it every day and it brings me back to my work every day. I see ‘always starting from scratch’ as an essential aspect of my approach.
The exhibition features works from two different groups of works.

The small-format works in the exhibition are ceramic sculptures. They show still lifes, to a certain extent portraits of table tops or tablecloths. Ornamental bands, similar to borders, open up their own formal language, detaching themselves from the motif and moving towards abstraction. The pictorial bodies are cast from clay, painted with engobe – a liquid clay mixed with natural pigments – during the drying process and then fired in a single pass. By tinting the colors, the respective motif is worked out plastically and spatially with just a few brushstrokes. This technique involves working wet-on-wet, which means you only have a limited amount of time to work. In this respect, the engobe technique is similar to the affresco technique, whereby the colors only achieve their luminosity through firing.

Also on display in the exhibition is a diptych O.T.. A large-format painting consisting of two pictures. They are two parts of the same picture, whose togetherness is intensified by their separation. An object is carved out with a quick, visible brushstroke that gives a sense of the manual. The dialogue between the two halves of the picture is created by the coloring, the style, the motif and the spatial placement of the two halves in relation to each other. The two halves of the picture, measuring 119 x 168 cm, together make exactly 2 ㎡. The ratio of the two side lengths is 1 : √2 (1 ∶ 1.414), like that of a sheet of paper in DIN format. In music, the √2 is the frequency ratio of two tones in equal temperament. Two tones that form half an octave. “
Theresa Hecker