Herbert Hinteregger

Looking at the surfaces of his images painted with ballpoint pen ink, it becomes apparent that he has found the perfect painting medium to achieve metal-like, shiny, opaque, dark blue surfaces of unfathomable depth. Ballpoint pens are highly pigmented and highly viscous in their consistency, which means they do not leave any trace of brushstrokes, while preserving the painterly blur of a seemingly perpetual flow. The ink is obtained in a long and obsessive process of draining out countless refills for ballpoint pens, and then applied to various base materials such as denim, tulle, brocade and linen. The artist sometimes joins these images, with their correspondingly rather reduced vocabulary of forms, in expansive installations such as the huge 'raft' presented at Taxispalais in Innsbruck. With such forms of presentation and, of course, also with this first major monographic publication, Herbert Hinteregger explores contemporary possibilities of painting while including, as a matter of course, any conceptual strategies of the twentieth century such as the role of materials, spatial references, and work processes.00Exhibition: Taxispalais Kunsthalle Tirol, Innsbruck, Austria (04.03.-11.06.2017) / Kunstverein Heilbronn, Germany (15.07.-10.09.2017).