ART-PREVIEW: Ane Mette Hol-Becoming

Ane Mette Hol explores marginal phenomena of art production. Her eye locked on minor matter—items that fall on the ground while making art in the studio, for instan- ce, or traces left in an exhibition space after installing the works—she sharpens the viewers’ awareness of the conditions surrounding artistic production.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: mumok Archive

At first sight, Ane Mette Hol’s exhibitions appear as precisely curated assemblages of inconspicuous ready-made objects. These “worthless” and anonymous things from the art world, such as rolls of packing paper, cartons, sketchbooks, notepads, or wrapping paper, appear to be given an “auratic” enhancement solely through Ane Mette Hol’s curatorial intervention in the white cube of the gallery – totally in the sense of Marcel Duchamp. However, each work by Ane Mette Hol is in fact a simulation of a ready-made. For each object, film, or installation is a very time-consuming, handmade drawing. In this play with the simulation of reality, a tension emerges between individual authorship and anonymous copy, which the poet Kenneth Goldsmith called “non-creativity as creative praxis”. Ane Mette Hol’s drawings are not “expressive” in the sense that one would recognize her “handwriting,” and yet her gaze and personality are “inscribed” in the works through the time-consuming production processes. The alleged neutrality of the works is literally “individualized” by Ane Mette Hol’s physical work process and attributes new levels of reading and seeing to the “false ready-mades.” A piece of packing paper randomly dropped on the floor, indicating that the exhibition space was only recently painted, splattered dispersion paint complete with specks of dust; color checkers and gray cards used in reproduction photography to adjust the exposure so that the picture is as close to the depicted object as possible; lined notebooks or sketchbooks decorated with pencils or other visual clichés, stacks of paper and packaging material: on closer inspection all these inconspicuous materials and scraps turn out to be detailed, perfectly rendered drawings.  The high level of precision on which Ane Mette Hol operates in her drawn objects, the meticulous rigor with which she imitates shades and color nuance, and the deliberate deceleration she applies to her own work process—all this contributes to her recali- brating the relationship between production and reproduction. Worthless objects like packaging materials, a shipping box, and stacks of paper are exhibited as photore- alistic images and in reference to ostensibly anachronistic genres like the trompe l’oeil. Although Hol’s drawing and astute manipulation bespeak almost excessive affirmation, the objects themselves remain off-the-shelf commodities and disposable goods—elements of a throwaway society. In Hol’s artistic recycling process, however, the parameters of artmaking and the artist’s contemplations become visible via her own tools. Ane Mette Hol not only uses conventional drawing materials like pencils, charcoal, or pastels but also picks up unusual ones such as wax, silver, and acrylic lacquer. The ar- tist analyzes surface textures and reconstructs them in a painstaking, lengthy process. In doing so, she often transfers her drawings’ carrier material from one specific state into another—a transformation that brings out supposed readymades, mirror images or picture puzzles of reality, and “simulacra“, at once strange and fascinating copies without originals.

Photo: Exhibition view,  Ane Mette Hol, Im Werden (Arbeitstitel) / Becoming (working title), , mumok-Vienna, 2021, Photo: Lisa Rastl, © mumok

Info: Curator: Franz Thalmair, mumok – Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Museumsplatz 1, Vienna, Austria, Duration: 8/7-10/10/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.mumok.at