Bertram Hasenauer – Trickster

Bertram Hasenauer's solo exhibition features paintings that hover between recognition and uncertainty, with faces and landscapes created through layered pigment and precise drawing. About Faces fade into and out of focus, dissolving into white light and velvety shadows. Elsewhere, mysterious landscapes seem to rise up out of deep shades of red and blue. In Trickster, Bertram Hasenauer's solo exhibition at Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery Berlin, images hover between recognition and uncertainty, inviting into a world of flickering forms and perceptual play. Across mythology, the trickster appears in many guises: a character who moves across boundaries, eluding social and cultural expectations. There is an element of play, but also deception. When we encounter a trickster, we know to be wary: things may not be as they seem. For Hasenauer, this quality extends beyond the subjects he depicts to the act of image-making itself. Some of his figures are named after famous tricksters, such as Loki, the shapeshifting god of mischief from Norse mythology, or Ananse, a figure in West African folklore who most commonly takes the form of a spider. Others are named after characters that Hasenauer himself has invented. Yet rather than depicting specific individuals, he creates what he calls an 'idea of a figure'. Each portrait is created through a slow and exacting process, involving the application of very thin layers of pigment on a white-primed canvas or the precise drawing of a silhouette in graphite on a black surface. Working with as few lines as possible, Hasenauer is interested in the point at which perception ends and imagination begins. The paintings give us just enough information to recognise a face or body, but leave enough unresolved for our minds to complete the image. In Ananse, for example, the figure is a woman rather than a spider. Her face appears almost unfinished, with a portion seemingly 'missing', erased perhaps or simply folded out of sight. Yet we instinctively fill in the absent detail, completing the image in our minds. In this way, the painting becomes a kind of collaboration between artist and viewer: what we see is partly what is there and partly what we imagine. Like the trickster itself, the image resists being pinned down. Hasenauer extends this play by creating uncertainty around the physicality of the paintings. The ochre works, such as Ratatosk, for instance, appear as if they are photographs worn by the sun. To create this effect, he uses a thick layer of gesso to build a textured base, allowing its shapes and lines to guide the composition and produce a weathered appearance. In Mechaniota, the canvas seems to have been folded and unfolded, as if it were an image carried around in someone's wallet or pocket. In both cases, our perception of what we are looking at is unsettled: is it a painting, a photograph, an object that has aged or been handled? Alongside the portraits sit a series of small 'landscape' paintings, some more abstract than others, in which the brushmarks evoke the movement of clouds or waves, the spray of foam or a rising fog. 'These could be the in-between spaces which the tricksters inhabit,' Hasenauer suggests. Like the figures, these landscapes resist a fixed reading. They seem to shift between representation and abstraction, appearing and disappearing as we look at them. Seen together, the paintings create a quiet sense of wonder. Each time we return to the work, something seems to have changed: a detail reveals itself, another vanishes, a face becomes more distinct or melts into nothingness. These are paintings that ask us not just to look again, but to question the images that surround us. Read more Toggle Painting