Hannah Heilmann: Red Drawings
In many ways, it is a wonder that the exhibition Red Drawings exists. It defies time - or the lack thereof - and has grown out of the cracks of the private everyday grind. Here time is everything, and there is never enough. Not enough time to love, to care, to work, to clean, to see the doctor, or to get ready. Some days there is not even time to get out of the house, and the days all blur together.
As a result, Hannah Heilmann takes the present moment as her point of departure, transforming the rhythms, constraints, and improvisations of lived experience into artistic material. In Red Drawings, drawings on painted paper are exhibited side by side with mixed-materials collages and metal stick-figure sculptures. The works are fast, precise, and existential, and come to life in stolen moments, a strange headspace, and grow out of whatever materials are within reach.
In a suite of red contour drawings, a nude person set within a bedroom interior is fumbling with stick-figures - or, more precisely, trying to put them on as if they were clothes. The stick-figure is impossibly tight to get into, and the struggle resembles something like a birth, a murder, and a love scene. The drawings balance the figurative with something more diagrammatic and psychedelic, hinting at causality without any real conclusions. Instead, they offer shifts in states of body and soul.
The red drawings are accompanied by a series of ‘calendar-works’ built from date-clips from bread bags. Here time is set by the number of bread bags that a family goes through in a week, and the always overflowing trash cans. A sort of kitchen-table expressionism from a family falling apart and pulling itself together again.
Throughout art history, we find numerous female artists who have engaged with a question that is also central to Hannah Heilmann’s practice: What happens to artistic production when the artist’s time is fragmented, occupied by care work, or already structured around the needs of other people?
In 1992, the French artist Louise Bourgeois created Altered States, a work executed in red ink and textile paint, in which the body, motherhood, violence, and memory are interwoven. For Bourgeois, private life is not merely a subject matter, but a material that is processed through intimate and often repetitive artistic practices. Similarly, from the 1960s onwards, the American performance artist Alison Knowles worked with transforming everyday domestic activities into artistic material. In her Fluxus scores, entirely ordinary activities such as making salad or soup could become artistic actions.
In Hannah Heilmann’s work, the structures of private time become visible in a different way. She collects date markings from industrially produced bread rolls bought at the supermarket, or from the packaging of her daily contact lenses, and incorporates them into her collages. These small indications of expiration dates, production dates, or days of use thus become traces of time that would otherwise pass unnoticed. A related form of temporal registration can be found in the work of the Japanese artist On Kawara, who, from 1966 onwards, created his Date Paintings: paintings displaying nothing but the date on which they were made. Here, the date becomes both subject and record of the particular day on which the artist lived and worked.
In Red Drawings, time behaves differently: “It splatters out”, as Heilmann puts it. "I have asked myself: how much privacy can the artworks bear? If I pour it all in, how much runs back out? Does the personal run off and leave the political behind? The drawings are about masking, neurodivergence, time, parenthood, identity, grief, acceptance and anger. Where my earlier work circled clothing, consumption and the environment, the red drawings are a narrowing of focus: they stare at the political private, at structures so strange and cramped and skewed.”
