Interior ou interiority ? 

From October 14 to November 4, 2023, HATCH brings together artists Olivia Bax (born in 1988, lives and works in London) and Veronika Hilger (born in 1981, lives and works in Munich) for a duo show curated by Thomas Conchou. Initiated by Margot de Rochebouët and Giovanna Traversa, the two artists engaged in a sustained dialogue throughout 2023 around their artistic practices. A sculptor and a painter, they discovered numerous shared interests, including a determined and vigorous use of color. Olivia Bax’s Boo-Boo (2021) and Veronika Hilger’s 8 untitled (2023), placed in conversation at the entrance of the gallery space, testify to their commitment to a powerful chromatic palette. Along with 6 untitled (2023), they introduce the exhibition as a dynamic conversation between the artists and their mediums. These works alone embody the intentions of ‘Confab Window’: to create an evocative and inhabited landscape that invites the viewer to wander and introspect. 

Within the context of this collaboration, the concepts of threshold, boundary, and passage (of place, state, or emotion) have particularly captivated the artists. The exhibition explores several questions raised in the book ‘Interiors and Interiority’, edited by Ewa Lajer-Burcharth and Beate Söntgen and published in 2015. The two authors, also engaged in a conversation between Germanophone and Anglophone spaces, wonder how we began to conceive subjectivity as an internal element within the body and psyche? From literature as an autobiographical form to the pictorial tradition of Flemish painting, from the study of bourgeois domestic interiors of the 18th century to the psychoanalytic model, they trace genealogies in Western thought to understand how the idea of ‘interior’ became attached to the perception of self. 

In the works of Bax and Hilger, there is a shared desire to explore liminal spaces that open pathways between interior and exterior, objectivity and subjectivity. Bax’s sculptural environments oscillate between systems and characters, serving as both containers and figures imbued with personality. This is exemplified in Oriel (2023), a new production that emphasizes the deployment of a hollow space within the artist’s sculptures. Her fascination with architectural sedimentation and borrowings from functional objects is also expressed through the emergence of windows. Once equipped with pockets or nests, her sculptures have now become architecture, allowing the viewer’s gaze to pass through. The internal space is as significant as the protruding elements of the framework or texture, revealing a second sculptural level that is not immediately apprehensible to the eye. 

For Hilger, the painting is primarily the space of a landscape that intertwines natural and artificial reliefs. Abstraction and figuration are suspended in ambiguous landscapes where signs appear like protagonists: so-called “associative” forms, sometimes biomorphic and sometimes symbolic, circulate between different pictorial planes. At their junction, portals often appear, emphasizing the passage between worlds or subjective states. Particularly noteworthy are 2 untitled, evoking Plato’s cave or Marie-Antoinette’s grotto at the Petit Trianon, where form and the idea of form seem to overlap in play of shadows and repetition. 

In the works of both artists, the interest in sometimes highly intense chromatic impact, the fondness for the familiar and intriguing, as well as the junction between body, landscape, and structures, engage in a dialogue with the legacies of surrealism. ‘Confab Window’ translates their shared attention to the effects of thresholds, in-betweens, and the processes of instability that these circulations generate in their practices. The title of the exhibition also refers to the shared period of time between them and the continuation of this conversation among the works in the exhibition. New productions are presented alongside existing works in the gallery’s alcoves, which are conducive to thoughtful contemplation. Here, one discovers works stemming from peripheral practices of the artists: a series of drawings for Olivia Bax and a ceramic piece for Veronika Hilger.

— Thomas Conchou