„Demons“ Ausstellung Alexander Höller 10. Mai bis 7. Juni 2025 Galerie Hegemann, München

In the organizer's words:

With "DEMONS", Alexander Höller presents his new series of works. In doing so, he takes up an original subject of painting, which he transfers stylistically and metaphorically into the present day.

Under the influence of the Christian faith and the Catholic Church, demons found their way into Western art in the Middle Ages at the latest. And they have lost none of their fascination to this day. In his new series of works "DEMONS", Alexander Höller takes on this highly symbolic theme and expands it to include both stylistic and metaphorical components that herald new beginnings, renewal and redemption. In doing so, he ties in with the ancient interpretation of spirits and intermediate beings, who were regarded as mediators between good and evil or the gods and humans.

At the same time, Alexander Höller's new paintings are a reference to the much-invoked inner demons that tormented visual artists such as James Ensor, Vincent van Gogh and Edvard Munch, as well as many writers and musicians, throughout their lives and creative careers - and yet were a decisive driving force behind them. Demons are therefore to be understood dialectically: As tormentors of the soul and dark forces on the one hand - as a motor and stimulator for both human and artistic purification and maturation on the other.

This ambiguous claim to the demon subject is reflected in Alexander Höller's motifs, which present set pieces of exposed mouths and teeth as well as eyes and compose them into rudimentary faces. In doing so, he operates in the mode of deconstruction, where the fragmentation and dissolution of forms leads to a break with lines, planes and symmetries. Despite the sketchy, geometrically conceived style, the figures thus acquire a painterly depth and create a new formal language from their dissection into individual components.

While the eyes and mouths, with their symbolic distortions and reduction to their linear essence, are kept in dramatic black and white and thus emphasize the dark side of the demonic, individual picture surfaces and the backgrounds captivate with a polychrome colour scheme of red and green as well as orange and blue tones, often in complementary contrasts. The latent menace is thus broken up in terms of color and transformed into a hedonistic chromaticism. In other words, the demons are given a positive connotation.

This is precisely Alexander Höller's intention. Through the principle of the destruction of forms and the complementary arrangement of colors, he suggests the overcoming of the inner demons that drive him; and thus enables their transition into something good and meaningful. The inner truth, i.e. the struggle with the demons of the soul and the process of finally confronting and pacifying them, is transferred to the canvas and becomes the pictorial truth. Alexander Höller thus corresponds to Paul Cézanne's concern "of the debt of truth in painting".

A further, albeit unconscious, reference is made in Alexander Höller's works, in which eyes dominate the pictorial narrative; they thus seem like a contemporary continuation of Ernst Wilhelm Nay's iconic eye paintings from 1964/1965. It is about the double effect of looking and being looked at, of impact and re-impact, which unfolds between the work and the viewer - and thus becomes a reflection. Like Nay once did, Alexander Höller dresses the eye shapes in dynamic, abstract contexts and combines them with an expressive, strongly contrasting color language.

The "DEMONS" works also owe their complexity to the many underlying layers of paper resulting from the pasting over of old paintings. The aforementioned painterly depth is then given to the works by a mixed media technique in which Alexander Höller first uses spray paint to transfer his preliminary sketches and then gradually works out the motifs with oil pastels and acrylic paint. This results in a technical and material interplay of several levels, which reinforces the three-dimensional character of the paintings.

While Alexander Höller initially started the "DEMONS" series in darker colors, the works became brighter, more polychromatic and more sensual over time. This illustrates once again how, in the course of artistic contemplation and confrontation, the darkness in the soul and work recedes - and leads to a catharsis, at the end of which crisis management, reorientation and self-discovery are achieved.

About Alexander Höller

In his studio just outside Munich, the young artist usually works late into the night, accompanied by hard and driving rock music. Born in Schweinfurt in 1996, Alexander Höller was already painting stones from his parents' garden as a child and selling them for 1 euro. At 17, he left grammar school a year before his A-levels so that he could devote himself entirely to painting. "I dropped out of school, not to 'become' an artist, but to 'be' an artist," he says today.

Because he was still too young, Alexander Höller attended a private art workshop in Munich for a year. Finally, he was accepted as a student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Nuremberg for the 2015 winter semester - without his Abitur. There he studied under Professor Thomas Hartmann, among others. From 2018 to 2020, he graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, one of the most important and oldest art academies in Germany. His works have been shown in numerous exhibitions in Nuremberg, Regensburg, Berlin, Munich, Vienna, ART Karlsruhe and Kunsthalle Schweinfurt, among others. In the USA, his works have been exhibited in Aspen, Chicago and Miami at Art Basel.

The work cycles:

His first work cycle "Wald" (Forest) is purely abstract in character and borrows from Art Informel. In the multi-layered, complex paintings, Höller takes up the archaic vegetation patterns of forests and copses and creates completely abstract views of nature with highly filigree ramifications and impenetrable net structures, which are reminiscent of the abstract expressionists around Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline and Cy Twombly in their gesture.

At the same time, they pay homage to the myth of the German forest, which was implemented by the Romantic painters and continued thematically in the 20th century by artists such as Anselm Kiefer and Georg Baselitz, whom Höller counts among his idols.

In his second series, "Der stumme Schrei" (The Silent Scream), Höller switches to a more restrained figurative style and focuses on a strongly graphic style. Here it is hybrid creatures and cubist to orbicular figures that give the viewer the outstretched middle finger. In this way, Höller wants to stand up for the freedom of the individual, whose natural right it should be to live out one's life far away from social conventions, exaggerated demands and bigoted moral concepts. With his deliberate fragmentations and formulaically sketched figures, Alexander Höller refers to role models such as Pablo Picasso and Jean-Michel Basquiat, who also stood up for the freedom of art and the independence of the spirit.

His "Neurons" series of works consists of objects with fluorescent cords whose synapse-like structure is intended to make human cognition and natural intelligence visible.

For all his works, Alexander Höller has his canvases produced by a Belgian craftsman who also supplies Damien Hirst and Gerhard Richter.

Exhibition: May 10 - June 7, 2025

Gallery Hegemann

Hackenstr.5, 80331 Munich

https://www.galerie-hegemann.de/