Barbara Nierhoff, Kunsthalle Bremen 2006
Simone Haack follows in the tradition of classical art: She paints. The young artist with trance like security has placed herself in the long tradition of representative, realistic painting and has formed her own unmistakable style.
The human being is her prime interest - mainly the female figure. The artist chooses unusual postures and perspectives in her nude paintings. The women usually remain in a body stance that hovers between being existentially highly charged and natural casualness. So we look from above onto a squatting woman, who pulls her legs firmly to the upper part of her body. The arms protectively encircle the body not allowing a view of this naked torso. Figures shown crouching or rather in the posture of an embryo are a leitmotif of Simone Haack's. Protection and lack of protection are both made into themes and illustrate an important basic experience of man.For this reason the artist usually abstains, when portraying her figures, from all attributes which would unveil the social or emotional context of her models. The same applies to individualising her figures. There are no fashionable hairstyles to anchor the women in the here and now and no noticeable physiognomy chains them to the individualistic.
Thus Paul Klee's central idea that art does not render the visible, but makes visible, is clearly manifested especially in Simone Haack's supposedly realistic pictures. Although her paintings follow the rules of realistic painting, they still establish a "reality which we associate with dreams, memory and imagination."¹ This impression is strengthened by the artist abandoning a spatial involvement in the representation. Simone Haack's figures are often placed into a space- less nowhere – stimulating associations and the viewer's fantasy. This is particularly evident in the work group with the nude figure of an old man. There he crouches, the man, alone, his body crowned with a green-shining animal mask, steadying himself with one hand against a non-existent wall and looking attentively into an invisible distance. It seems to be an archaic picture. Does it show the man as gatherer and hunter – listening, searching, and, about to jump? But the hunter has neither weapon nor booty. On the contrary, the figure, in its nudity and isolation, appears vulnerable. The artist, with fine irony and some humour, lets the western image of the stronger sex tremble.
This is also true of another painting of this work group, in which the male nude reappears. This time Simone Haack presents the figure two- fold. The man and his alter ego crouch next to each other in the foreground. The figure on the left peers attentively out of the frame and seems to be listening to someone, whilst the figure to the right looks cautiously downward. But what is being said and who is talking? The young female in the painting is no less irritating. She gives the impression of a prisoner or of a victim thrown to the ground.
Her bearing is tense and her head slightly pushed forward like that of a cat on the prowl.
This emotionally highly charged female nude is in stark contrast with the relaxed expression of the male figures – their bearing unconstrained, their gaze innocent. These men do not seem to pose a danger.
The composition operates with antagonistic aspects, which are, at the same time however, embedded into a strict and at the same time harmonious structure. Simone Haack positions the female figure, for instance, in the golden section and cushions the figure's tenseness by composing it pyramid-like. The male nude figures formulate a certain symmetry by their duplication and varied pose. The psychic condensation of the theme is controlled by a strict composition supported by the colour palette and mode of painting.
The painter does without strong colour contrasts and prefers a cool and reduced palette with tones of mixed blue, mixed red, mixed violet and mixed white. In some of her paintings, however, she widens her palette in favour of stronger contrasts. Here the pure primary colours stand next to each other and create a pulsating, almost baroque-like animation of the depicted body reminiscent of Peter Paul Rubens. But this effect is achieved solely through the colours and not by an expressively applied and wild brush stroke. The often reduced colour palette especially of the nude paintings brings to mind the paintings of Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershøi and at the time alludes to the contemporary paintings of Belgian artist Michaël Borremans, whom Simone Haack greatly appreciates.
Just like in Borreman's suggestive work, what happens in her paintings remains mysterious and puzzling. This is true of most of her pictures like those, for instance, which show delicately built female figures performing mysterious acts. They are ever so faintly reminiscent of Hans Baldung Grien's depictions of witches. Nor does the stretched-out female figure reveal her secret. Enveloped in nightly darkness and illuminated by a spotlight, she lies stretched out on her back. We know similar images of isolated female figures from Cindy Sherman. In Simone Haack's painting nothing points to a crime – the body appears uninjured and without any trace of violence - , but this picture nevertheless has a great dramatic impact caused mainly by the gaze. Is this still a human look, or are the eyes glassy, has life left this woman?
It is characteristic of Simone Haack's work that she directs the gaze of the portrayed past the viewer out of the frame, thus charging the space outside with tension. Only rarely are the figures looking for direct confrontation as in the example given by the young woman. With this painting the artist touches the genre of portrait art, and yet the personality of the portrayed is not in the centre. The image does not remain in the individualistic, but tries to capture, in the young woman's gaze, a universal element of human life. The expression strongly recalls Marlene Dumas' painting series Female (1992/93). Both artists place the human figure in the centre of their artistic exposition and abstain from working with life-models. Instead, they use photographic models. Life-models irritate both Simone Haack and Marlene Dumas, who comments: "I then loose the freedom of the amoral touch which to me is the pre-condition of a good painting."²
With Simone Haack, the "good painting" is always also a beautiful one, which refers the viewer back to himself, because "the beauty of painting is its permanence in the exclusive present: The unbelievable intensification in a single moment of inverse perspective because the painting penetrates us, awakens our remembrance, activates our memory, and viewing elucidates the images of ourselves."³
1 Elke Bippus, Phantasmagorien – Unheimliche (Bild-)Realitäten, in Simone Haack, Cat. Exhib. Hochschule für Künste Bremen and Städtische Galerie im Buntentor, Bremen 2004, unpag.
2 Marlene Dumas 2000, quoted from Marlene Dumas. Female, Cat. Exhib. Helsinki Art Gallery/The Nordic Watercolour Museum Skärhamn/Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden 2005/06, page 47.
3 Jean-Christophe Ammann, Schönheit der Malerei, in: Schönheit der Malerei, Cat. Exhib. Städtische Galerie Delmenhorst 2005, pages 12 ff.