Future Nostalgia – On Imagined Homelands

A Hug From The Art World is pleased to present Hell Gette's Future Nostalgia – On Imagined Homelands. The term Future Nostalgia in many ways is an oxymoron. In Svetlana Boym’s 2001 book, The Future of Nostalgia, nostalgia is defined as “a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed.” It’s fair to say Gette has been experimenting with building a new homeland. This is a good starting point in deciphering Gette’s first exhibition of pure landscapes. To do this, she draws on elements that make her feel particularly at ease, for example, motifs from her own drawings, plein-air watercolors, along with the use of digital visual tools such as Photoshop, emoji icons, and video game aesthetics. She goes on to photograph her own drawings and watercolors so that she can then digitalize them, using digital cut out tools to extract individual elements which are then reassembled on her photoshop canvas by using digital techniques such as gradient tools or modified emojis. It’s a playful collaging process and, along with Gette’s quite unusual family history involving the story of the so-called Spätaussiedler, it comes as no surprise that Gette is interested in the idea of displacement. Perhaps this is why it’s second nature for Gette to draw from all these multiple sources to create a unified whole in the resulting oil on canvas paintings that she calls “landscape paintings of the future.” The exhibition comprises paintings and ceramics. It’s not a coincidence that part of Gette’s language is ceramic based. There is a physical fragility in the landscapes she created, which made me recall a conversation I had with Polish/American deconstructionist architect Daniel Libeskind. In reference to the concept behind the Imperial War Musuem in Manchester, England, which he describes as a ‘constellation composed of three interlocking shards' with each shard being a remnant of an imagined globe shattered by conflict. Having the good fortune of asking Libeskind firsthand how he came up with the idea he told me he simply dropped a ceramic sphere on the ground and collected the broken shards and repositioned them. New meaning created out of something we know already exists in a certain way. Gette’s use of the emoji motif’s reference and further the potential of Michel Majerus’s stylistic quotations. Gette’s approach and appropriations land somewhere between Majerus’s vision of popular culture and the landscapes in Richard Prince’s Canal Zone series, add a bit of visual electricity and Gette’s Future Nostalgia is tautological perhaps?! Hell Gette (b. 1986, Karabulak, Kazakhstan) is a Munich and Brooklyn-based artist whose work merges traditional plein-air techniques with the visual language of the digital world. She calls her vibrant, emoji-filled oil paintings “#landscapes 3.0,” blending Photoshop effects, gaming iconography, and mythic symbols to create scenes that sit between analog painting and virtual reality. Her playful yet sharp compositions reflect on technology, culture, and identity. Gette’s work is included in the collections of many prominent private and museum collections internationally, such as the Galerie der Stadt Sindelfingen Museum, Xiao Museum, and the Art Collection of the District of the Upper Palatinate in Bavaria, Germany. Recent exhibitions include Ze Sun Ze Sea Ze Mountain at Shrine in New York; CyScapes at Galerie Nagel Draxler in Berlin; ## at Annka Kultys Gallery in London; Ol' Neptune's Only Daughter, Museum Sindelfingen; CTRL3R at Each Modern Gallery, Taipei; Welcome To Hell at Kebbelvilla Museum; 🦅 at Nagel Draxler, Cologne; #UnzUnzUnz at Nagel Draxler, Kabinett, Berlin; An Original Netflix Series at Hubert Burda Media, Munich; Art Basel; #Landscape 3.0 at Galerie Karl Pfefferle, Munich; Two Of The Same Kind, group exhibition, Craig Robbins Collection, Dacra, Miami, 2022. Gette completed her Studies of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, Germany, under Professor Oehlen, graduating with honors and being awarded the Debutants Prize. She lives and works between Munich and Brooklyn.