Helene Appel: Among Trees, Among Sand Grains

In her painting, Helene Appel reflects the things of everyday life with high precision. Whether it is a piece of meat, lettuce leaves, fishing nets, twigs, plastic bags or puddles, Appel presents her cropped subjects in plan view, on untreated canvas in a realistic scale. If one takes a closer look, though, this attitude reveals its radical nature. Detaching herself completely from the tradition of still life, Appel does not strive to develop a painterly signature, does not emphasize her distinctive ductus. Instead, she carefully seeks an adequate mode of expression for each of her pictorial objects, thus emphasizing their particular physical presence. Despite the realistic representation, Appel’s works evoke a sense of a high degree of abstraction. The impression is that of a distanced look that creates a tension between the familiar and the unaccustomed questioning the relationship we have to our environment.