“Tina, everyone knows that you paint the 1000 hares! It’s now called Hasentor!”
Harald Falckenberg, 2012
Artcollector
TIDE TV, 2011 (german)
Art Magazin, 2009 (german)
Harald Stazol, 2009 (german)
“The Little Hare School by Tina Oelker, written by Dirk Pfaff, 2009 (Status: #0266)
The most seductive aspect of Tina Oelker’s art is the ease and beauty of her paintings. And it’s quite simple: anyone who looks at the many colorful hares in her small-format paintings cannot help but find them simply beautiful. This is primarily due to the technical expertise and compositional virtuosity with which she captures her bunnies on canvas: every day a new rabbit, every day a little different, always as a portrait – and always in a way that compels the viewer to look the rabbit in the eyes. Tina Oelker paints hares as if on an assembly line, relentlessly.”
The compulsion for repetition is the driving force that gives her the energy to take on the long-eared hares again and again. She has set herself the goal of stopping at one thousand hares, but that’s not certain.
Unlike the serial production of Carl Andre, Donald Judd, or Andy Warhol, Tina Oelker places great importance on the individual gesture of her painting, where the personal does not disappear behind industrial production but—on the contrary—is elevated to an artistic principle. That’s why her studio doesn’t resemble a factory but rather a craft workshop. To leave no doubt about this, a sign hangs above her studio in Hamburg with the inscription ‘Hare Manufactory’.
The tricky aspect of the serial production method, which does not copy but instead creates something entirely new at all costs, is the almost unsettling innocence of her images. Once the gaze gets caught in the many portraits of Meister Lampe, as the absoluteness of pure aesthetics confidently asserts its claim, the trap snaps shut: The hares, rendered in this absurd 1000-piece series with a banality bordering on poster-like simplicity, exclude any critical reflection from the outset.
There are no ironic references, no hidden critical allusions that would suggest placing the paintings within any artistic context. This is what makes them so dangerous. While it may still be acceptable for the paintings to suffice on their own, the barely discernible dialectic does not readily emerge amidst so much arranged painterly familiarity. The mere thought of it is excluded from the outset. The reference-less serial production, reaching the limits of the decorative, can—after viewing the first hundred images—be identified as an expression of a fundamentally honest artistic strategy committed solely to one idea: granting beauty in painting its rightful place
A challenge that not only breaks a taboo but also includes every possibility of being thoroughly misunderstood. How could this work better than by expressing the essence of beauty through the means of painting? This attempt alone justifies giving the viewer no chance to think and instead allowing oneself to be repeatedly enchanted by this rush of colors, which makes no effort to question the laws of aesthetics.
In this context, one must mention Walter Benjamin and his beautiful phrase about the ‘work of art in the age of its technical reproducibility,’ as he recognizes the compulsive nature of repetition as the only viable path to art. In repetition, Benjamin sees the central, morally neutral background noise of life: ‘Only what is repeatable leads to art. Compulsions of repetition—only they create style, only they convey the sense of necessity and fate imposed by a work to its audience.’
It is, above all, the familiarity of Lepus europaeus that tempts one to think of nothing sinister. This is primarily due to the mimesis that manifests itself in the portrait views of the common hare. The more often one looks into the eyes of the hare—because it always keeps its gaze on you—the more evident Oelker’s intention becomes: to reveal the human within the animal.
“It is primarily the human-like pose of the hare that evokes images from photo booths: looking straight ahead, staying still, and hoping everything fits into the frame. And that’s usually how it turns out—both in the photos and in Tina Oelker’s paintings. The captivating aspect of this seemingly endless portrait series is especially evident in the depiction of the hare as a trophy. In each individual painting, a sense of reverence for the wildness of the animal is palpable—a wildness that cannot be subdued by any means.
Hares, it must be noted, are extremely defiant and cannot be kept in captivity, unlike their doppelgängers, rabbits, who merely pretend to be hares. The fact that they can still be captured on canvas is nothing more than an allegory of the hunt, symbolizing the superiority of civilization over wildness.”
This realization, however, does not help. Just as little as the elevation of the tormented creature to a fetish which, even when presented a thousand times, hardly loses any of its fascination. Pursuing these considerations would mean engaging with questions such as: Is the repetitive depiction of hares not, in fact, a silent accusation against their mortal enemy, humanity? ‘These questions,’ says Tina Oelker, ‘lead nowhere.’ She says this because addressing such objections would open a gateway to issues that have nothing to do with her artistic strategy.
What she is aiming for is something entirely different. And this ‘different’ refers to her artistic work as a whole, not, as in the hare series, to a small spectrum of her creative output. The matter of the oh-so-cute hare is nothing more than a reflex to the trend-driven, hype-obsessed art market.
To give just one example: The reaction of the art audience to her wonderful, free drawings has always stood in an inexplicable contrast to her works where even the faintest hint of—what else?—a hare could be discerned. ‘As soon as someone spotted the outline of a hare in a drawing, all attention immediately shifted to that one piece,’ Tina Oelker explains, shaking her head.
“Her performances and large figurative works fared no differently. If even the slightest hint of a hare could be detected—something she occasionally included with an ironic wink—the initial distance toward her work would turn into sheer enthusiasm. This was a reaction Oelker could not explain.
The question remained: Where did this enthusiasm come from? Why were people so interested in hares, even when they were only vaguely recognizable? Could it have something to do with the ‘Sissy effect,’ which forever tied actress Romy Schneider to the role of the Austrian empress, no matter what other roles she played? Was it such a big mistake to have ever drawn or painted a hare at all?
The simplest solution would, of course, be to ignore the reactions and let the hare simply remain a hare. But Tina Oelker didn’t want to make it that easy for herself. If the audience was so eager for the bunnies while disregarding her struggles, then fine—they would get their hares! She then got serious: she went hunting with hunters, obtained a hunting license, shot a long-eared hare, skinned it, cooked it for hours, and then went back out to stalk another one.
Perhaps, she thought, she would understand why the hare kept dancing on her nose. One could also say that Tina Oelker wanted to bring the hare—threatening to become an obsession—to an end in the truest sense of the word. But life does not always follow the laws of art. Hence this exhausting and insane effort. Hence this painting marathon that pushes the limits of what is bearable—a visual feast that one can indulge in endlessly, again and again. And one should look into the hare’s eyes at least three hundred times to understand why Tina Oelker will continue working on hares until the topic is finally resolved once and for all. Hopefully.”
