Wunderdinge - Diederik Gerlach, Bertus Pieters

Angelika Hasse (Neunkirchen 1960) has lived in the Netherlands for 28 years. Born and raised in the German Saarland, she completed studies of graphic design at the Fachhochschule in Mainz. She then moved to The Hague, where she worked as a graphic designer. Following her heart, she chose to become an artist and took lessons at the Free Academy. Given her years of experience in creating a combination of text and form on assignment, it is not surprising that text fragments appear in her work. She is partly inspired by advertisements and commercials in magazines to which her parents subscribed. She thus playfully keeps in touch with her German background and language and pays tribute to the stylish design from the fifties and sixties, when craftsmanship had not yet been taken over by the computer. According to the artist, words arrive like unexpected visitors. They come from notes and clippings, which she keeps in boxes - a waiting room from which they are sometimes only released after years to find a place in a drawing, collage, gum print or painting. The textual additions are thought-provoking, but nowhere do they express any of the world’s suffering; with a gentle hand, the viewer is led to the enigma that surrounds us every day and of which we are a part: life itself. Angelika’s world is one of suggestion, the small gesture, the look of understanding. Her open-minded way of working does not lead to empty games. The outside may be enigmatic and light in tone, but beneath it lies a passion that springs from the past. Perhaps we should therefore understand her work above all as a long journey home, a search for a lost “Heimat”, which rises above the absurdity of current events. Diederik Gerlach, 2021