Sweepings, 2015

Basel 2015
Sweepings

Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle

Helene Appel Sweepings, 2015 Watercolor on linen 70 x 40 cm Unique Helene Appel is a master of questioning reality. She paints deceptively real-looking chopped vegetables, grains of rice, thin fishnet threads, dirty puddles, and pencil peels. The artist always sources her subjects from everyday life, from the nondescript, from that which receives little attention. Appel approaches these objects with calm, care, and mindfulness; she demonstrates great reverence by not pretending to deconstruct or outplay their peculiarities and by abstracting her own expressiveness from the work process. The finely painted lines of the nets, the puddles of synthetic resin, and the other subjects always correspond to the sizes of the real objects. With great care and patience, Appel renders her materials and individual parts into groups to form a whole. The repetition and arrangement of the individual parts create dynamic formations and thereby illustrate the power of the collective.