Volker Hueller's first UK solo show - in the Viewing Room at Timothy Taylor Gallery - is both troubling and brilliant.
Dark, densely evocative work fills Timothy Taylor's recently opened Viewing Room space this May. Berlin-based contemporary artist Volker Hueller is having his first UK solo show, and although small in scale, it's both beautiful and haunting.
On display are eleven small etchings, two larger etchings (including a diptych), a little bust and a large-scale mixed media collage. For me, the most successful works – and the ones with which Hueller is rapidly cementing his reputation as an artist of note – are the small-scale etchings. These are delicately intense works that hark back to a fin-de-siècle Europe of dark corners, absinthe, Freud and worry.
One work catches my eye immediately: Nach dem Sturm (After the Storm) stands out for its ochre and stained tobacco tones. This hand-coloured etching is dense with worry – lines of anxiety are scrawled across an oddly-tilted visage, whilst crimson washed nose and cheeks suggest a misplaced dedication to the bottle. There's a down-turned sadness here, in this blotchily geometric interrogation of character. It's a portrait of an era, but at the same time the sense of melancholy feels both personal and specific.
The other more successful works depict a range of angular fantasies. Stylised figures stand, stilted, in night-time forests, their relationships uneasy but undefined. One figure has a sort of bird's head; another's arm is simply a spiral. Rainbows and moons cast eerie light over tones of brown, ivory, turquoise and crimson. A man pisses into a woodland pond.
The press release cites Aubrey Beardsley and Paul Klee, but for me the most obvious comparison is with Arthur Rackham, whose illustrations of the Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm share the same sense of fantasy adventure gone troublingly awry. There's also something, I think, of William Blake here – not just in terms of technique, but in the way that one seems to be transported into a fully fledged world and then simply abandoned there.
These etchings are complemented, outside in the main space, by Agnes Martin's abstract canvases, which provide a tranquil antidote to Hueller's intensity. But respite also comes back inside the Viewing Room in the form of a large-scale, more abstract, silver collage of hay, canvas and paper. The Tree suggests to me that Hueller is taking us back to the time when the abstract and the figurative first began to diverge. It's a sort of origin, the likes of which Blake was so obsessed with.
But although this works in context, it's the small pieces that really leave a lasting impression. Where these works triumph over the larger etchings is that the quality of the hand-etched line maintains its prominence. These scratched lines serve both to create the detail of an image and to obscure it, to open up and to close off. In the larger works, the ambiguous power of these lines just seems a little lost. In Hueller's most evocative work, it's the viewer that's lost, rooting about among the dark forests and unnerving dreamscapes of an unknown, unknowable imagination.
Volker Hueller is at Timothy Taylor Gallery until 21st May 2010.
Image credits, starting top right: Nach dem Sturm (After the Storm) 2010, Etching with watercolour and shellac, 91/2x111/2”; Twist 2010, Etching with watercolour and shellac on paper, 91/2x111/2”; Nariss 2010, Etching with watercolour and shellac, 91/2x111/2”; Quadrat des Bosen 2010, Etching with watercolour and shellac, 91/2x111/2”
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