The approach to the past from a raw material such as that which Beate Höing (Coesfeld, Germany, 1966) uses, based on ornamental ceramic figurines and objects that could rest on our grandmothers’ crocheted carpet, does not move through the angle of nostalgia, but through the territory of sacralization, the idea of building a cultural object that goes back to an original past and gives meaning to our present. With this point of departure, Beate Höing‘s works also address the configurations of the times in which we live, the overproduction present in the markets and our inability to absorb everything and survive this kind of globalized sublime. Thus, abundance is always present in her works, and whether we are looking at a ceramic composition or one of her paintings, the basic representation of an idea is not enough; her larger formats repeat and insist on ornamentation.
Sometimes the procession of concepts becomes visible only when the works hang before our eyes, like his series of birds, always patiently waiting to be numbered and assuming passive positions reminiscent of the processes of a taxidermist. These birds are the maximum representation of the border where Höing‘s production is located: a traditional art, beautiful in its details and of a dark ugliness in its imperfections. Everything fits together if we pay attention to the fairy-tale atmosphere that pervades his ceramics, that magic that certain objects have to be both bizarre and attractive at the same time. Beyond these ceramics, the artist’s discourse in ‘It is all about love’ also runs through the pictorial object, evoking the same philias that we see in other formats. In her paintings, we find the same taste for adorable agglomeration, for filling the canvas with information and creating a certain visual asphyxia in the viewer.
Entering Beate Höing‘s work requires a commitment, an acceptance of the rules of the sacred and the devotional, a veil that hides the elementary particles of our tradition, that primitive essence that seems to motivate the artist’s sculptural processes and that ultimately distances her ceramics from kitsch in favor of the plastic object charged with a critical charge. Critical and perverse.
