Gregor Hildebrandt

Gregor Hildebrandt (born 1974 in Bad Homburg, West Germany) is a German contemporary artist who lives and works in Berlin, Germany

In the late 1990s, the artist recorded 'Falschgeld' by German experimental group Einstürzende Neubauten before cutting the magnetic tape out and pasting it into his sketchbook.

He was awarded a Studienstiftung scholarship between 1998 and 2002 and received a scholarship at the Deutsches Studienzentrum in Venice the following year, while still a student.

In his artistic practice, Hildebrandt makes extensive use of pre-recorded cassette tapes as material in his pictures and installations.

The tapes are applied directly onto canvases and photographic prints and in room-sized installations.

In his paintings, he adheres the coated side of cassette tapes onto a canvas, presses on it with a brush or roller, and rips the tape off to create the defined, yet sporadic lines on his works.

He repeats the process before finally gluing them onto the canvas for good to create what he calls the “negative” painting.

For sculptures, he shapes vinyl records into bowls, sometimes stacking them to create what the artist calls a “sonic wall made of pillars of records.”

Hildebrandt started thinking about incorporating audio into his practice during his time at the University of the Arts in Berlin.

Hildebrandt's signature canvases known for its magnetic tape covering were developed in the 2000s, gradually increasing in size to take on architectural dimensions.

The 2021 large-scale installation Hirnholzparkett (2015), shown at G2 Kunsthalle in Leipzig, incorporated 35,000 audiocassette tapes into record-sized reels, cast into epoxy resin and layered across the floor.

Although Hildebrandt's work makes formal reference to Minimalism, the addition of a great number of subjective and autobiographical citations actually deliberately repudiates this strategy.

For Hildebrandt, the cassette tape as artistic medium, especially in its original function of storage medium, fulfils an important function: it enables the artist to add a further “invisible” dimension to his pictures.

Playing with perception in this way is a major characteristic of his work; the picture is completed in the head of the viewer.

If the contemplation of his art incorporates the heterogeneous cosmos of Gregor Hildebrandt's references to music, film, literature and, last but not least, art history, his works turn out to be complex montages, in which pictorial associations from different spheres combine and interpenetrate.

Hildebrandt employs the material of his every-day environment without aesthetic or theoretical inhibition and playfully links aspects of conceptual art and minimal art with his personal life and experience of pop culture.

Since 2000, Hildebrandt has been in a relationship with fellow artist Alicja Kwade.

Hildebrandt graduated from Hochschule der Künste, Berlin, in 2002, after he studied previously at the University of Mainz between 1995 and 1999.

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Since 2017, Hildebrandt has been operating Grzegorzki Shows, an exhibition space at his studio.

In 2021, Hildebradt was the first guest curator for TheArtists, an online sales platform for unrepresented artists; he picked from his own students at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich.

Hildebrandt is represented by Wentrup in Berlin, Grimm Gallery in Amsterdam, Almine Rech Gallery in Paris, Brussels and London and Emmanuel Perrotin in New York.

and Casado Santapau gallery at Madrid.

Their son Horatio was born in 2020.