Falter Not Fall by Gésine Hackenberg

Artist list

Gésine Hackenberg

Gésine Hackenberg was born in 1972 in Mainz, Germany, and has now been living in Amsterdam for about twenty years. She started her training back in Germany, in the early nineties, before relocating to the Netherlands to study at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, where she graduated in 2001. She started her professional practice immediately, and quickly gained recognition for her peculiar use of everyday objects, especially tableware. In deconstructing easily recognizable items, she imbues them with new value, new functions and new meaning. As early as 2002, she was already granted the prestigious Talente Award. In 2013, she completed a masters degree at the MAD-Faculty in Hasselt, Belgium, where she has been teaching since 2014. She also gives metalsmithing and fabrication courses at the Vakschool Edelsmeden, in Amsterdam, since 2008. Hackenberg regularly gets invited to give lectures and teach workshops internationally, and her work was awarded numerous times, notably with the Stokroos Foundation Scholarship for Modern Silver, in 2012, as well as three awards from the Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture. Her work is included in several museum collections and was featured in numerous international publications.
 
For the exhibition Falter Not Fall, Hackenberg uses movement, especially rotation, as a visual element. She creates dynamic compositions that appear to be producing kinetic energy, although each structural element is static. With the series Tumbling, brooches are composed of successive layers of colored glass rings that seem to be rotating continuously. Her compositions tend to trick the eye, as one would expect the overall structure to be on the verge of collapsing. As for the works from the Drawing series, they come as material expressions of three-dimensional sketches. In an expressive and dynamic motion, the artist’s gesture unfolds onto the wearer’s body and into space. Hackenberg involves the wearer into her work, looking for ways to amalgamate their movements with those suggested by the jewellery object. Both the object and the body are thus held in a moment of tension between balance and chaos.