1. Along the Way
Hilde Overbergh’s work resonates with urban spaces and with traces left behind by humans. The traces in question are not spectacular eye-catchers. They are not the shiny office giants, nor the flows of cars, or shop windows overloaded with luxury. The traces Hilde Overbergh chooses are things on a human scale, things that have lost their luster, and that play second fiddle. They are what you see while biking through the city, just in passing by, on your way to something unrelated. The things that don’t seem to matter, and that we observe from the corners of our eyes. The worn-down crosswalk, graffiti on walls, containers full of construction waste, the red-painted strips of asphalt that mark bike lanes, stray cardboard, reflective tape, gone-with-the-wind plastic caps, discarded mattresses on sidewalks, and broken furniture waiting for the garbage collection to arrive. A forgotten still life with the heartbeat of a living city. They are the things you encounter along the way without looking for them. Because what should an artist like Hilde Overbergh be looking for? She sees because in what she is observing. It doesn’t get any easier than that.
Berlin was one of those urban environments that inspired Hilde Overbergh. She spent some time in this city as an artist-in-residence in 2020. Berlin is an environment where change takes place at a high pace. Where the jadedness of history is reflected in the dynamics of modernity. It was exactly there where she found the beauty of the obsolete and the unexpected, which inspired her to create her own, different reality. Hilde Overbergh is not the type of artist for whom the studio is separated from the rest of the world, and where things are contrived in the silence of isolation. Hilde Overbergh works with what the world has to offer, and that reality extends beyond the studio.
2. The Reality of Material
Her work is a special form of realism, in the purest sense of the word. Her starting point is material she finds and that she uses for what it is. Be it for its texture, for its color, for its history, for its expression, for its tactility. Or anything else that’s noticeable about material. For her, material is a reality in itself. But in order to see that reality, a different way of looking is required; an “open” eye that can see things separately from the function for which they were once created, and apart from the familiar meaning and value these things have for us. That kind of material. In her eyes, a thrown-away mattress is no longer a mattress, but a thing that has been reduced to form and material, and that is therefore completely autonomous. She sees visual possibilities. She sees a drawing in the mattress cover, and cuts it out to give it a second life in her studio. Or she holds a roll of tough, glossy duct tape that can put together the seemingly impossible. And suddenly she sees the malleable possibilities – the visual quality. In Sassy talks and crazy lives from 2019 she stuck two strips of duct tape on the image surface at a right angle. What started as a painting over which she first spanned another fabric, eventually became an assembly of which the two strips of duct tape are a surprising completion. They impose an angular and compelling shape on an initially painterly image, and steer it in a completely different and, above all, physical direction. You can feel the material, as it were: almost carelessly cut, a little bulging here and there, as if the cut was a vibrating wound. A strip of duct tape then becomes a painterly gesture. It is this inescapable reality of tape that allows the work to rise above itself. Fragments of everyday life become paintings through the hands of the artist.
Hilde Overbergh uses anything: tent poles, foam plastic, plexiglass, industrial paint that you simply buy at a hardware store, a piece of colored textile, a sheet of aluminum, a mattress. As long as it has some kind of character that remains when the object is released from its function. Material with a heart, material with history.
You could call the process to which she submits material some kind of recycling. If you can see a strip of duct tape as something that stands on its own, as something that no longer serves to plug pipe holes, then the material shows itself in its truest form: strong, gray, and shiny, with a structure of textile. And the artist deploys the material through this reality, which leads to the conceptualization of the banality of the material. In the heart of the matter. In this process it is essential that not a single bit of representation is visible. The depiction of reality is about the last thing she wants to do. Her work is reality itself, and it is the artist who appoints fragments from that reality as art.
3. It Takes Two to Tango
The transformation process Hilde Overbergh puts her material through can be called a form of abstraction. It starts with bringing stuff she encounters in her ever-changing environment to her studio. This is an act of isolation, and an important first step. She removes things from their original context in which they had a function and an associated meaning. In the studio a tent pole suddenly isn’t a tent pole anymore, and tape is no longer tape. This isolation is an act of creative amputation with the purpose of new opportunities. The material has been thrown back onto itself, and all of a sudden it has to depend on its own intrinsic qualities, which paves the way for a new and different point of view. To abstract is like peeling fruit: you keep going until you have nothing but the core left, with which you then make a new and different dish.
To avoid any possible misunderstandings: Hilde Overbergh abstracts, but that does not make her work abstract. There is little abstraction going on with an abandoned mattress cover or an old stretcher. But something else starts to happen once the raw material ends up in her studio. At that point the object becomes one of the tools in her toolbox. Where oil paint is something precious to other artists, to her it’s objects, left on the streets, that no longer seem to be of value to anyone, but in which she sees the power our world resonates with.
Hilde Overbergh’s work is based on the contradictions within different materials, which she turns tangible explicitly. Her paintings, installations, collages, and assemblies are based on the tension between opposites. One can’t be without the other, the objects derive their meaning from each other. Differently put, in order to dance you have to be in pairs; it takes two to tango. She confronts flat surfaces with space. Form is put under pressure by emphasizing the counter-form. Full versus empty, open versus closed, present emphasizes absent, light fights dark, etcetera. Are you focusing on the black dot?, an assembly from 2018, is one of those works built on opposites. This makes the work layered, ambiguous, and approachable from different viewpoints. The work asks questions concerning the issue of viewing, questions to which no answers belong. Because what are we looking at? Not just at a black circle, despite how much it dominates the artwork. This black disk – on closer inspection a sheet of black sandpaper – automatically leads to its pendant: the two smaller blots of blue pigment below, that seems to be fighting shoulder to shoulder against the stern black. A similar dependence applies to the layered left panel of the assembly that cannot be seen without the emptiness of the rectangle next to it – which turned out to be residual material from the workshop of a furniture upholsterer.
And while we’re talking about viewing: there is something else going on with the left part of the assembly. The shelf with the black and blue spheres shows something, and at the same time hides something else: it obscures the view of the small painting that is partly hidden behind it and which, precisely because of this, arouses greater curiosity. A typical paradox: concealed parts only increase the desire to see the whole.
So we also look at what we don’t see. In this context, the pink mousse looks like a frame, but without an image. And what may be the image belonging to that frame sits next to it: a shelf and a painting, together a couple, that seemingly have stepped out of the frame. Only to continue as an independent image, away from the frame that turns the image into an illusion. From that point of view is Are you focusing on the black dot? about something that has always been considered essential to painting: that it is an illusion. If this is the case, Hilde Overbergh thoroughly undermines that illusion. And not just in this instance. Because you could see this work as a pars pro toto for her oeuvre and artistry. This may prove to be a key artwork, as it shows something of the program that is still evolving in her artistry. There is no illusion. There is only reality: that of the material and that of viewing.
It is viewing that can make us aware that behind the visible there is also something invisible; that reality is more than the sum its parts. Are you focusing on the black dot? ultimately continues to be a mystery considered from this point of view. And art does not aim to solve the riddle, but rather to enforce it. Through contrasts and paradoxes, for example.
4. The Studio, a Way of Viewing
The artist studio is a magical place where something is made that has never been seen like this before. And which, therefore, no one asked for in advance. Not until it has been created by the artist and thus exists as a world in itself, when we see “it” and attach value to it, does it become art. But “Art” is a label given by the outside world.
The concept of art does not matter at all in the artist studio. In the studio it is all about the work of the artist that is always moving, and that is never completely finished. Only when it crosses the threshold and enters the outside world to stand on its own two feet, does it get declared completed by the artist. And even that is never entirely certain in the case of Hilde Overbergh. Because what is typical to her artistry is that it is an ongoing process. The studio is a delivery room where her work is in a continuous state of birth.
This is what characterizes her way of working and thinking. Starting something and not, or not exactly, knowing where it will end, and, especially, leaving everything openly ended for as long as possible. That is what we could call the “studio attitude” in its purest form.
A nice example of this open mind is “Perhaps they are not acting” (2021). It’s the kind of war that’s hard to denominate. Because what is it? A painting, a sculpture, an assembly? Maybe it’s all these genres at once. But does it matter which box it fits in? Hilde Overbergh isn’t an artist who allows the choice of form to be determined by the content. Rather reversed. She falls for idiosyncratic material that turns out to have unsuspected possibilities, and gets to work with it, partly intuitive, partly deliberate. This leads through trial and error to a form that could not be imagined beforehand. As if the form, and with it the content, is dictated by the material. The matter is the message.
“Perhaps they are not acting” literally started as a painting. The starting point consisted of an aluminum plate on which the artist painted, and out of which she then cut a rectangular hole, in order to break the illusion of a classic painting. A hole can be a pictorial element as well. Then she cut the whole plate in half, diagonally, and started looking for a composition, which resulted in a construction for which she welded the two parts back together at an angle of 45 degrees. But the fight continued. What to do with the painting that started it all? Which had, in fact, become redundant. The carrier had become the image itself, an important turn of events that’s often seen in her work. In, for example, “An unexpected moment”, 2016 (p XX) the stretcher frame shimmers through the transparent synthetic fabric like a modernist rectangle. The wooden slats no longer support the statue, but they have rather become the statue.
Because the painting of “Perhaps they are not acting”
became redundant, she overpainted the aluminum plate with ordinary lacquer from a paint shop – monochrome light blue. And the depiction that disappeared because of that intervention? That got generously compensated by the found mattress cover placed on top of the image, with lush flowers in a sea of warm blue. It is a surprisingly tactile counterbalance to the cold, sharply cut aluminum. And at the same time, the act of viewing is questioned again. We allow for our perception to be guided by a basic cognition: what is heavy and dark belongs at the bottom, what is lighter belongs higher up. This is how we make gravity visible, and how we look at landscapes: land at the bottom, the sky on top. Hilde Overbergh turns this around. She painted the heavier aluminum light blue like the weightless sky, while the much lighter mattress cover that is dominated by dark blue seems to float above the aluminum plate, despite looking heavier. As if it can withdraw from gravity. Another refined game of oppositions.
5. Try Again, Fail Better
Hilde Overbergh brings objects from our everyday reality into her studio, like a magpie brings everything that glitters into its nest. She sees possible new life in what got dismissed by the rest of us. She turns things around, looks at them from all sides, dares to experiment, and gets to work. Or she puts them aside to ripen them, as it were. Sometimes things take time in order to really be seen. Or time is inexorable, and turns the material out to be unusable?
To approach reality in this manner, one needs an unprejudiced look that can peel away the layers of things to trigger new ideas. You have to be able to think in an unconventional way if you don’t want to use classic art supplies like paint from a tube, a canvas, precious stones or metals, paper, and so on – material that carries the promise of art, and that has already proven its technical capabilities for centuries. As said, Hilde Overbergh finds her material in the streets, or buys it at a hardware store – neither places you would think of when it comes to visual art. It’s also not the kind of material that ensures success in advance.
Her way of working takes time and patience. To look, to walk around, to be on the way, to find, to search – which is remarkable: it’s not until she finds that she knows what she was looking for. Arrange, put away, resume, change. And above all, waiting and watching, over and over again, and always differently. This attitude also fits her work that is never really finished. Everything remains changeable to this artist. To her, art is a living organism, and her way of working is a constant try-out. For example, how do you connect different elements in one image? Do you place them next to or on top of each other, in each other, or far apart? It is precisely this relation that determines the character and the meaning of the artwork, and therefore also whether the viewer experiences the work as a painting, an assembly, or a spacial work. For her, this process is never fully completed. We, on the other hand, have the need to draw borders and to define things, but of course the artist doesn’t have to take any notice of this convention. Art is boundless by definition. So when is something completed? The painter Pierre Bonnard was legendary when it came to declare a painting finished. Or rather: to consider it as not complete. He could never stop. Some critics saw this as indecision, others praised him for his open attitude that sometimes went so far that one day before the official opening of an exhibition of his, he had himself secretly locked up in the museum with his brushes and tubes of paint. That way he could work at night without being disturbed, and still change some things at the last minute. We may think: “and in order to finish the works.” Finish? Indeed: what is finished? Hilde Overbergh is also an artist for whom nothing is ever completely finished. It’s a matter of looking with an open spirit, and of seeing things differently. And also of trying – and with that comes failure every now and then. It is a genuine artistic attitude, which writer Samuel Beckett described in his story Worstward Ho as: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”