Afternoon light

The painter Lisa Hoever works in oil, watercolour and mixed media on canvas and paper. The basis and reference point of her works is always a figurative ‘model’. These are rarely people, more often dried fruits and berries, blossoms, buds, leaves, twigs, branches, grasses, but also vessels, fabric samples or packaging material. Personal trains of thought help determine the composition: the idea of a doubling, a mirroring of an object or a form, partnerships and contrasts, something floral or an ornament, lines and dots. In terms of execution, however, she often abandons representationalism in favour of colour and form. Linear, graphic elements and areas of colour that have been poured or applied in numerous layers come together in the artist’s works. What emerges are not still life-like depictions of objects with a classical foreground and background – Lisa Hoever’s pictures create their own realities; her objects are transformed into pictorially worthy entities within the edges of the picture plane.

The exhibition in the Cabinet of the Museum Franz Gertsch comprises works from the last three years. One group is made up of mid-sized landscape and portrait format works made on the paper from her most recent publication ‘Nomaden’ (Nomads) (2019). With a view to our forthcoming show, she developed the selected large formats pieces from the mid-format works: the artist pushes the limits of her technique here, which involves pouring thinned paint on the paper that is lying on the floor. A third group of works concerns overpainted watercolours of varying sizes and shapes, some of which have been intensively transformed, others delicately, into a new state with oil paint.

Lisa Hoever was born in Münster (D) in 1952 and has lived in Bern since 1988. She studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf with Rolf Sackenheim and Alfonso Hüppi (master student) and was a lecturer at the Hochschule der Künste Bern HKB for many years. Since the late 1970s, she has exhibited regularly at home and abroad. A retrospective exhibition of her work was held at the Kunstmuseum Winterthur in 2008.

The exhibition was curated by Anna Wesle in collaboration with the artist. The accompanying catalogue was published by modo Verlag, Freiburg i. Br.