Johanna Helbing-Felix
October 26 to December 4, 2015: Johanna Helbling-Felix
The exhibition presented at the Heart Center in 2006 bore the promising title Underside of the Sky. Today, visitors can view the continuation of this theme in the same rooms. The artist, an experienced pilot, took a picture of the surface of the earth and the underside of the sky. What do you experience and see when you get closer and closer to the sky and away from the earth?
These are primarily landscape paintings that dissolve into structures, vague bodies and reflections of light. The composition is predetermined, such as the Rheinaue. Helbling-Felix shows a series of four drawings of this motif. In the soft colors of the pictures, one believes to see colors of the sky, as if blue-soaked clouds were reflected in the landscape.
Roads, fields, forests, lakes and ponds glide beneath you. A magical panorama is revealed, which continues in your mind's eye. The viewer sits in the airplane and experiences the transformation of the earth's surface into abstract patterns.
It is striking that alternating rich and matt red and orange tones adorn the filigree surface of the earth. Perhaps these are artistic souvenirs that Helbling-Felix brought back from her trip to Australia in 2004. During a three-month stay as artist in residence, she was able to admire the southern continent's color palette, rare to European eyes, from the cockpit of her Cessna.
You should also take a look at her objects from the Fremdes Landefeld group of works in the showcases in the entrance hall. The works date from 2015 and are made of clay with and without glaze. She used a special firing process that was developed in Japan, the raku technique.