Angela Fette
Die hermetischen Häuser
12. Mai – 27. Juli 2019

Angela Fette is a painter, performer, designs sculptural objects, costumes and writes poetry. With her exhibition at the Kunstverein Arnsberg, visitors are invited to explore her Hermetic Houses. What lies behind them is shown by pictures from different groups of works by the Düsseldorf artist, which were created over a long period of time. In addition to word pictures, including the motif on the invitation card, which oscillates between scroll, calligraphic signé and implied architecture, she is also showing her catastrophe series and films from her Weisser Westen collective with media artist and music computer scientist Phillip Schulze.

The Guardian of Scepticism - a monumental design painted on the wall - remains from the previous exhibition In Medias Res. With the question mark that she holds in her arms as an attribute, the figurine, clad in a long robe and wearing a circular headdress, asserts the significance of criticism and doubt, the necessary questioning of apparent facts and imposing truths. Characteristic of Angela Fette's enigmatic pictures is the partly impasto, partly watercolour-like painting style. They are made up of several translucent layers and colour gradients. The depictions of a meta-reality full of enigmas bear witness to her engagement with the painting of Giorgio de Chirico and his Pittura metafisica, coined in the 1910/20s, whose paintings use their own symbolism to characterise stage-like, mostly deserted places and evoke melancholic, time-defying moods through altered proportions and an alienated colour scheme. Their characters are characterised by the ‘melancholy of a decommissioned machine’, according to Fette. They are bridge-building, mediating instances between past and future, in that they are ‘linked to our own temporal phenomena of robotics, artificial intelligence and biogenetics’ (Heike van den Valentyn).

Hermetic comes from the Latin and means something like ‘sealed with a mysterious seal’, ‘so tightly sealed that nothing can penetrate or escape’, but also ‘versatile, dark’ - a mysterious expression. Hermeticism is a late antique, religious-philosophical doctrine of revelation, the author of which is Hermes Trismegistos and which lives on to this day as an occult, mystical and astrological school of thought. In everyday language, we are familiar with phrases such as ‘hermetically sealing a building’. However, the house here is to be understood more metaphorically - as a mental building and mirror of one's own self, exposed to changes and redesigns.

Angela Fette studied painting at the Düsseldorf Art Academy. She is represented in national and international exhibitions, including at the Zeppelin Museum, Friedrichshafen (2019), Museum MARTA, Herford (2018), Parkhaus im Malkastenpark, Düsseldorf (2018), Ludwig Forum Aachen, Aachen (2016), Shakespeare Theatre, Gdansk, Poland (2016) and Herzliya Museum of Contemporary, Art, Israel (2015).