GREGOR HILDEBRANDT: CHERRIES BLOOM IN APRIL
Perrotin Tokyo is pleased to announce Cherries Bloom in April — the first solo exhibition in Japan by German artist Gregor Hildebrandt.
April 3 – June 21, 2025
Gregor Hildebrandt’s passion for art, poetry, and music is as extensive as it is infectious. His ability to internalize and contextualize what he sees, reads, and hears informs the connections he draws in precise and distinct material form – poetic and open-ended, inviting viewers’ reflections. The images we encounter in Gregor Hildebrandt’s work are nearly always created in an intense dialogue with music, striking a balance between heightened presence and notable absence. He refrains from offering mere illustrations or direct visual translations of music. Instead, he presents images created from the very materials music recordings are made of – be it tape or vinyl. Fully embracing their materiality, texture, and colors, he also integrates the connotations of the music contained within them.
Es ist Juli (It’s July, 2024) and Sommernächte fliegen ohne Hast (Summer Nights Fly Without Haste, 2024) are the first two lines of a song by another German singer-songwriter, Klaus Hoffmann, describing the emotions and fantasies of an exuberant village party. The canvases show a remarkably detailed field of daisies in Hildebrandt’s trademark style, where individual strands of tape are applied to a canvas partially coated with adhesive. Once removed, the magnetized layers adhere to the glue-coated areas, forming a negative image, which is then mounted onto another canvas to create its matching positive counterpart. What is absent in one canvas is present in the other.
A fresh body of work fills an entire room in the exhibition, reflecting the theme of cherry blossoms suggested by the title: a series of seven or eight tape paintings in various smaller formats, no longer black or brown, but a surprisingly bright red. Unlike his other tape paintings, they stand alone, lacking positive or negative counterparts. Together, as an ensemble, the red tape paintings perform a Reigen, a circular dance.
The artist created these from the red tape that, in compact cassettes, precedes the magnetized tape onto which sound can be recorded. Collected over many years, they are rare and precious remnants from previous work (only a few centimeters of lead-in tape exist in every cassette, and red ones are particularly rare). The series experiments with different shades of red, punctuated rhythmically by the end markers. Inside a cassette, the red tape embodies the silence before the music begins – akin to the moment of focus when the conductor raises the baton before the orchestra plays.