Georgine Ingold

Georgine Ingold calls her paintings of the last five years Heroes, referring to the heroes of film history, such as Marlon Brando, or from the world of sport, people with whom she associates her own recollections. The first hero of her series of paintings was the kickboxing world champion Andy Hug. The country singer Townes van Zandt, whom she approached through film material, was also dealt with. Painted film stills from Heartworn Highways, the cult film about the country star by James Szalapski, have been run through on the canvas.

Georgine Ingold's paintings are usually divided into series that differ minimally from each other in the choice of motif and style. Each series can be read as an independent narrative structure, a kind of micro-story, employing the appropriate technical method - according to the motif - and thus set in its own time frame.

The pictures Georgine Ingold paints of her heroes are drawn from film or photographs. This is evident in the open mouths, questioning looks, the gestures, the positions of the people within part of the picture - and also by the way in which the light falls on them. The motifs are often brightly and sharply lit, which is noticeable above all from the contours and shadows. Faces thereby become relief-like structures, pieces of clothing become striped patterns, backgrounds ornaments. Through these reductions, the originals - film sequences of a matter of seconds - become abstract images. The impasto application of paint, on the other hand, the rough structure of the brush-strokes and the mixing of the colours, lead far away from the photographic originals and bring the painterly elements to the fore.

This can be forcefully seen in the series about Andy Hug's kickboxing fight. The lighting in the fight scenes here displays his full splendour. Georgine Ingold's expressive way of painting, consisting of individual fields and points of colour, suits the dynamism and the power of the two fighting bodies. The glare of the spotlights is reflected by the muscles bathed in sweat.

This exaggeration of the painterly method leads to the conclusion that the heroes may indeed be the subject of this painting, but at the same time are only an impulse for Georgine Ingold's painterly researches. It is less a question of the image of a hero, than the visual implementation of a personal feeling. This is evident above all in the artist's new pictures since autumn 2007 on the theme of female portraits in film scenes. True, these are called Selfportrait, but is is not hard to recognise that the settings for the people come from the world of film and TV series.

Precisely in a world shaped by the media, in which our reality and the perception of people of public interest is guided or replaced by pictures, this subject is of some explosiveness. In the interplay of the self and the virtual world of the film, with media situations, the painting may here offer new understanding through other ways of seeing. Because, through the simplest of abstractions, through clearly recognisable brushstrokes, Georgine Ingold manages to transform faces and figures, complete with their surroundings, into completely new horizons of meaning.

Lioba Reddeker, 2008
in catalogue "... aus einem malerischen Land"
HANGART-7