Petra Halkes – Bright Nights @ Ottawa School of Art

Petra Halkes: Drive-by Window Shopping 10 (Blur with Green and Orange), 2011 (copyright by the artist) 

When I walked by the Ottawa School of Art on my way home last week, I got a quick glimpse of the current Petra Halkes' exhibition. I could just see her paintings through the windows because the OSA was already closed; but they captured my gaze because they depicted exactly what surrounded me in that particular moment: The urban landscape at night. So I came back the next day...

The paintings – mostly small scale – base on photographs that Halkes took from the passenger seat of a driving car at night time. That's why they were blurred in first place; but the blurred views gain an abstract quality when she transfers them into paintings. They question also the representational function of photography.

“Bright Nights” Exhibition view (copyright by the artist) 

The street and advertising lights and the urban buildings have been morphed into abstract shapes. They are all blurred and therefore almost unidentifiable. But on the other hand they are universal: The scene depicted could be anywhere in Ottawa or somewhere else. Sometimes brand names like Tim Horton's or Cosco are visible, but in most of the paintings the abstract colour stripes and fields dominate.

Drive-by Window Shopping 6 (White Windows), 2011 (copyright by the artist) 

Halkes reminds my at the blurred figurative paintings by the German Gerhard Richter. In his early photo-realistic painted works he also worked from photos (made by himself or collected almost endlessly from magazines, advertisements and books) which he projects onto the canvas where he depicts them very accurately. In a second step, he blurs the painting by a soft, wide brush or a squeegee. They are out of focus, both literally and in the poetic sense. His paintings deal with the boundaries of human perception and pictorial representation, and the borders of realism and abstraction. Like the German art historian Wolfgang Ullrich writes in his “Die Geschichte der Unschärfe” (The History of Images out of focus, 2002), this is symptomatic for the area we live in, the postmodernity.

Drive-by Window Shopping 2 (White Blur), 2011 (copyright by the artist) 

By the way, the Hamburger Kunsthalle in Germany is showing an exhibition “Out of focus. After Gerhard Richter” (11 February to 22 May 2011) with stunning paintings which follow Richter's approach. The works on exhibition show a softened, veiled surface that refers to fading memories; but also things in motion that got blurred by movement in our hectic surroundings. This brings me back to Halkes' works that are now on view at the OSA and that also challenge our representational habits - worth a visit!


Facts: 
Petra Halkes – Bright Nights 
February 17 - March 23, 2011
OSA Gallery
35 George St. ByWard Market
Link to the OSA exhibition