Courtesy Eleni Koroneou Gallery, Athens

Thomas Helbig, "Engelchen" (2007). Mixed media, 31 1/2 x 14 1/2 x 15 3/4 in.

October 2008 Reviews

Manifesta 7

Jeff Koons

Chantal Akerman

Painting: Now and Forever, Part II

Erkka Nissinen

There is No There There

Elaine Duigenan

Kerry James Marshall

Peter Saul

John Massey

Bridget Riley

Pipilotti Rist

Armando Andrade Tudela

Gary Hume

Marine Hugonnier

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During a webcam interview on the occasion of the group exhibition “Rings of Saturn” (2006) at Tate Modern, Thomas Helbig made a deadpan statement about his paintings and sculptures: “The most honest thing to say is that I don’t know what I’m doing; it’s just happening.” This is not as naive as it sounds. His enigmatic words are apposite to his work’s Romantic thrust, magnifying the image of the artist as a would-be narrator of a dark and dreamy fairy tale. In “Complete Birth,” Helbig’s first Athens solo at the Eleni Koroneou Gallery—which since its inception in 1988 has showcased the work of numerous German-born artists—this attitude is effortlessly cultivated through a strong dialogic relationship with Novalis, Schlegel, and other masters of the fragmentary literary form. The poetic spirit of these writers has strong formal parallels to a relic aesthetic that permeates the quasi-abstract paintings and drawings Helbig presents in this show. In mixed-media sculptures such as Voegel and Ruckgeburt (both 2008) the Berlin-based artist makes use of discarded materials—cut-up waste tires, for example—to construct a deliberately ruinous landscape in shades of silver-gray cobalt and cyan-blue, along with some hypnotic lines of murky rainbow hues. It’s not an overstatement to say that Helbig’s exhibition has an engaging high-flown anachronism, as if a 17th-century equivalent to one of Schlegel’s “Athenaeum Fragments” were transposed into a spaceship flying past the Parthenon.

"Thomas Helbig" originally appeared in the October 2008 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' October 2008 Table of Contents.