Artists

Stef Heidhues

Press release

We are pleased to announce the current exhibition hook, line and sinker by Stef Heidhues, which opens on Thursday, 10 September at 6pm at our Berlin gallery as part of Berlin Art Week. Stef Heidhues's works begin with the familiar—with objects and forms that surround us daily: advertising signs, safety goggles, picture frames, saddles. Yet the sculptures we encounter in the exhibition space are neither readymades nor precise reproductions. On the contrary, the process involves taking a specific object—one that has found its way into the artist's everyday life and environment in some manner—and first scanning it with great care to grasp its materiality, surface, and form, and to take an impression. Materials are considered and tested, deemed suitable or unsuitable. A manually manipulated replica emerges; despite the new materiality, the traces and essence of the original object often remain legible within it, and yet something entirely new comes into being. This—to use a slightly hyperbolic term—"palingenesis" [Greek palin: again; genesis: origin] of the objects has several effects. Beyond their transition into a state of unusability (and the accompanying "loss of purpose"), they acquire a wide range of potential associations and attributions. The safety goggles joined together and cast in bronze (TWINBLOCK #01–#05, 2026), for instance—evoking Louise Bourgeois's Janus objects—transform into a swarm of high-tech, twin-winged insects or, depending on the interpretation, a squadron of spaceships. The saddle cast in polymer gypsum lying on the floor (Untitled (saddle_03), 2026) calls to mind splayed legs, but also a large black bird spreading its wings, ready for takeoff. The titular hanging sculpture hook, line and sinker (2026) is an interpretation of a fishing hook—complete with line and sinker—that is vastly distorted in scale and augmented with abstract elements. The Styrofoam packaging elements cast in aluminum (Placeholder #01–#05, 2026)—formerly protective transit materials for frameless picture mounts—now become frames themselves, with security stickers serving as the imagery; they are literal "placeholders," attached to the wall via eccentric fixtures. The quality of the specific material plays a crucial role here, as does the negative form—or void—that the "new form" inevitably carries with it: the aluminum frame indirectly reveals the (now absent) picture frame it once held; the saddle, the horse's back to which it was once fitted; the workshop goggles, the shape of the face they were designed to protect. It is a play on presence and absence: the form remains, while the object from which it was derived is missing. This void is essential to Heidhues's work. She is interested in what a form reveals, but also in what it leaves open—in its potential. In other words, meaning can emerge anew precisely where the familiar is absent. Speaking of gaps: this play with simultaneous presence and absence in space is also evident in the ongoing series No Sign (2019–ongoing), a sequence of signs featuring pairs of words on both sides. On the front and back (though it is unclear which is which) of these signs projecting into the room, the terms—often singular words rendered in bold black lettering—act like commands (INHALE / EXHALE, OPT / OUT). Others function as statements, even unfolding a poetic power (YOU SENT ME A LETTER THREE PAGES LONG / AND IT DIDN'T CONTAIN THE WORD YOU). The letters occupy the empty surfaces—those open and ostensibly neutral spaces of information—yet refuse to provide precisely what a sign is supposed to offer: orientation and clarity. At the same time, they gain something crucial: room for ambiguity, doubt, and new associations—while repeatedly raising the question of how empty spaces (whether mental or physical) can be occupied, shaped (or reshaped), and utilized (or repurposed). Can space ever truly be "empty"? Do we not instinctively begin to fill it (with expectations, desires, ideas, objects)? And what happens to that space and the individual works when they come together in a specific arrangement within an exhibition? Naturally, relationships inevitably emerge where none existed before, and the environment itself becomes, in a sense, a co-author. Here, too, the void just described—specifically in the form of a space left open—acquires a special kind of agency: a voice, as it were, in the overall unfolding of events. The term worlding—an uncomfortably trendy yet in this case highly apt concept—springs to mind; it refers to the act of "world-making," based on the understanding that reality is not a given, passive entity, but something that continuously emerges through relationships, actions, and perceptions. New contexts—and thus new connections (between objects, bodies, space, and materials)—and attributions are actively brought about. Heidhues highlights the potential latent in things familiar to us—potential that only becomes visible through material and contextual shifts. Her works do not create a self-contained alternative reality; instead, they effectively transform objects into alternative versions of themselves, thereby opening them up to a multitude of further interpretations and narratives. In doing so, she continually calls into question those supposedly familiar meanings. Katharina Wendler (Translation Hagen Hamm) ___ *The English idiom "hook, line and sinker" originates in angling (where a fish swallows the bait along with the hook, line, and sinker); figuratively, it means falling completely for something, committing oneself entirely to it, surrendering to it, and believing it without reservation. In the context of the exhibition, the phrase perhaps describes the moment of engaging with what a form initially promises—and, with that, the willingness to be deceived or seduced by it, or to be led down a different path.