Staging and Reality
New Landscapes by Heike Negenborn
28 October 2022 – 7 January 2023

Under the title “Staging and Reality”, the Galerie Poll is showing the first Berlin solo exhibition of works by the contemporary landscape painter Heike Negenborn. In addition to paintings and graphic works from the series “Rheinhessisches Tafel- und Hügelland” (named after an area called the Rhenish-Hessian Hills in English) and “Netscapes – Landscape in Transition”, the show will display new landscapes from France and Bolivia.

Heike Negenborn has developed her artistic approach within a field of tension between natural and cultural landscapes, which has given her a special eye for changes in terrain, vegetation, and the heavens. For her paintings and graphic works, she designs vast, human-made panoramas with mostly low-lying horizons and spectacular formations of clouds. Only at second glance does the viewer see that these precise, realistically painted landscapes are not depictions, but constructions of reality.

Unlike her works from earlier years, produced in projects lasting several months that constructed landscapes from regions in France, Italy, or Spain, the series “Rheinhessisches Tafel- und Hügelland” was created in Germany in 2021 and 2022.

This included the valleys and hills of the vineyards in Rhineland-Palatinate, where she lives, and on the cultural worlds they reflect. Here, too, Heike Negenborn has researched unusual perspectives as she captured these landscapes in her sketches and photographs. She then reworks this “archive of nature” in both analogue and digital form and constructs paintings and graphic works guided by aesthetic considerations.

The resulting series “Netscapes – Landscape in Transition” has been recognized with multiple awards; in 2002, Heike Negenborn was able to continue the work with a grant from NEUSTART KULTUR and the Stiftung Kunstfonds. With its many examples, the exhibition shows how the artist combines fragments of clouds and of the earth with perspectival grids that dissolve into digital pixels and mutate into the “netscapes” of the series title. This reworking of the cultural landscape is undermined by the reduction of her otherwise strongly coloured palette to tones of black and white and grey.

With her works, Heike Negenborn draws attention to the increasing appropriation of analogue reality by digital images and the resulting transformation of the landscape. The works’ clearly visible construction, as a combination of the methods of central perspective invented in the Renaissance and classical surveying techniques, not only supports the effect of depth within her images, but also transparently reveals the way in which the artist works.

Heike Negenborn, born in 1964 in Bad Neuenahr-Ahrweiler, studied painting in the United States at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland, and at Austin College in Sherman Texas, and painting and printmaking at the Academy of Fine Arts Mainz under Prof. Peter Lörincz. In 2021 she received one of the yearly scholarships awarded by the Stiftung Kunstfonds Bonn, in 2018 she was awarded the prestigious Palatinate Prize for Fine Arts, and in 2016 she received the Wilhelm Morgner Prize by the city of Soest. Heike Negenborn lives and works in Windesheim. Works by the artist are held in numerous public and private collections in Germany, Japan, Canada, and the United States.