Intersections: Bernhard Hildebrandt

El Greco’s painting El Greco’s The Repentant St. Peter (c. 1600–1605 or later), acquired by museum founder Duncan Phillips in 1922, is a visual embodiment of distressed emotions confined in a serene pictorial composition. It integrates the flatness, elongated forms, and sense of artifice of Byzantine art, the realism and stability of classicism, and the high drama of the baroque. Referring to Apostle Peter’s anguish at having denied Jesus three times after Jesus’s arrest (a betrayal that Jesus predicted at the Last Supper), El Greco’s painting captures Peter’s guilt, regret, and sorrow.

Bernhard Hildebrandt starts from El Greco’s painting and employs digital photography and video to stage an elaborate contemporary scene that highlights baroque theatricality and spectacle. Hildebrandt’s seven large-scale archival inkjet prints and seven-minute video all depict St. Peter’s repentance as a continuous, repetitive act, exploring the idea of unfolding time through digital media. The title, A Conjugation of Verb, further underlines the idea of repenting as an “active tense” of doing.

Much of Hildebrandt’s practice merges photography and painting. Although he was trained as a painter, photography has always had a great impact on Hildebrandt’s work; he is especially influenced by the medium’s early stages, from mid-19th century daguerreotypes to the late 19th-century photographic studies of motion by Eadweard Muybridge. The paintings of modern European masters Paul Cézanne, Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, Juan Gris, Marcel Duchamp, and Giacomo Balla, who all in their different ways attempted to distort the picture plane into multifaceted fragments, are also highly inspirational for the artist. Recently, the nexus between painting and photography has become the primary focus of Hildebrandt’s work. Just as early photography challenged the illusionary quality and representational character of realistic painting and pushed painting toward abstraction, painting has also challenged photography both visually and conceptually. This Intersections project links the painterly aspects of photography and the photographic bases of painting that intrigue the artist.