Hell Gette

1986 born in Karabulak, Kazakhstan
2012-2017 studied painting, sculpture and graphics with Prof. Markus Oehlen at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich
2018 Diploma with outstanding performance at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich

Hell Gette (born 1986 in Karabulak, Kazakhstan, lives in Munich) interweaves symbols of digital everyday life into her fantastic, garish picture subjects. Enraged emojis and cheerful symbols, empty speech bubbles and filled text fields hover in free association on beach scenes under the palms, integrated into brightly colored, paradisiac landscapes. Like painted adhesive elements, Gette's work integrates the signs of digital advertising and pop culture, which combine to form a picture between painterly collage and trivial-aesthetic panel painting. Behind everything, the interest in the symbols of pixels seems to stand, the resolution of the digital image in the variety of its motivic parts and the collaged re-composition, to the point of absurdity. But Gette's visual worlds are idyllic only at first glance, the application of digital tools consciously visible and crude. There is always a touch of danger in the air, which in some scenes reads like a potentially deadly announcement of the catastrophe in the digital paradise: a broken rainbow in the sky and water swirling on the ground, yellow lightning flashes, volcanoes spit fire. Fragmented skulls and zombies are reminiscent of the action-aesthetics of the video game. They are images between dreamlike sequences and apocalyptic sceneries, as borrowed from a screen with all its digital messages and entertainment options. # Gettes fantastic worlds, their "Landscapes 3.0", vary the traditional subject in a colorful game old-fashioned and latest image design. The wild, symbol-laden scenes are based on alienated plein-air motifs, which develop in the analogous manner of digital alienation from the watercolor to the photograph, and finally on the screen to ever more fantastic scenes - until, as if in homage to the panel painting, they are translated back into the oil, becoming worlds between digital and analog. Because despite all the flashing digital signs, Hell Gette is dedicated to painting in the 21st century, the traditional medium of the visual arts par excellence. It irritates the material qualities of color until it emerges from the canvas. The color application in the nuances of the rainbow is sometimes impasto, sometimes smooth and often contrasts with neighboring color surfaces. The expressive, material stroke forms the symbols otherwise characterized by pixels and flatness, transferring them in relief from the digital to the real three-dimensional. # Hell Gette graduated in 2018 with distinction in painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich under Prof. Markus Oehlen. Her work was last honored with the Academy's Debutant Award and included in the Hubert Burda Collection's permanent collection.