Gregor Hildebrandt: AUF FALSCHER SEITE IN DIE FALSCHE RICHTUNG | Almine Rech
This artist explores the possibilities of tape - cassette tape, VHS tape, “leader tape”, whatever that is - in his works. He’s been doing this since the late 1990s, when much of analogue media was in its early death throes. In 2025, tape is long gone - the music has stopped.
The show notes for Hildebrandt’s latest collection of tape-based works, exhibited currently at Almine Rech in London, claim to see a “Warholian bent” in Hildebrandt’s art. Which initially seemed silly to me: Warhol was always about the new and the now. Looking around, it reminded me more of Minimalism: one collection of tape-wrapped wooden blocks on the floor could have been a Carl Andre. Richard Artschwager’s photographic transfers (which I wrote about here) also seem to have been influential.
Elsewhere in the show, there’s London Wall, a site-specific wall of blue vinyl clamshells (left in the image below) and Mascha Kaléko Kasten (centre), an ink jet print on cassette boxes.
But maybe these influences are too serious: I don’t think Andre and Artschwager share much of a sense of humour. By contrast, Im Hof, from 2020, is a self-portrait of the artist on a bike, carrying a ridiculous huge paintbrush. The photographic image is transferred onto granite, which glitters darkly, lending an absurd glamour to the farcical scene.
Maybe that work is the key to unlock the rest of the exhibit. It certainly explains the notes’ otherwise baffling Warhol reference. Andy, after all, was always in on his own joke. Maybe these inscrutable, painstaking collections of dead media are tongue-in-cheek?
Hildebrandt, apparently seriously, sees his tape works as “memorials” to the music originally encoded in the tape. “Without the particular content recorded on the tape, it’s likely the cassette wouldn’t interest me very much as material,” he has said. “The contents remain.”
The exhibition forms a silent graveyard for music that cannot be played. Just like a giant paintbrush that can’t be painted with. It’s intentionally, uselessly absurd. Just like the show’s title, a final clue: it translates as on the wrong side in the wrong direction.
Gregor Hildebrandt: AUF FALSCHER SEITE IN DIE FALSCHE RICHTUNG is at Almine Rech (London). 06 June - 26 July 2025