CONNECTIONS

Olga Hilgers’ work was transformed in Mexico. Her voice grew stronger, and the intense torrent of her gesture became clearer. During her three-month residency at Lagos, she was able to explore an inner space that had always been pulsing since she began painting in Berlin. Throughout her training, she learned the formal and academic techniques of figuration, techniques she has now dismantled. She found a channel, driven by emotional impulse, that connects her with a fierce essence.

Upon arriving in Mexico, Mesoamerican signs and symbols called to her. In a dreamlike space, she connected with the jaguar; from there, she followed a path and found the meaning of her quest: to connect. That substance that binds us, whether each person to themselves or to others, began to manifest.

In the current collection of paintings, she explores different textures of that emanation of the awareness of being interconnected. Through various colors, she depicts the directions of the universe. She uses a mix of materials—charcoal, ink, graphite, acrylics, sanguine, pastel, watercolor, and gold leaf. This interwoven technique is the material appearance that supports spiritual force. And perhaps the presence of gold marks the energetic nodes that represent spaces of otherness, bringing flow to the multiple pictorial layers, which might well be dimensions of space and time.

In the truest tradition of abstract painting, where the contributions of many generations of artists can be recognized, her work resonates. From the foundational work of Hilma af Klint, which established the spiritual dimension in existence and the pictorial object as a means of making visible that which lies beyond what the eye can see, to Abstract Expressionism, which in large formats liberated geometry as a representational figure of the spiritual in art. We can see that Olga Hilgers draws from these sources to express the force of her native land, Ukraine, united with the Tloque Nahuaque, “that in which all things exist”, from the Mesoamerican worldview.

olgaMargarita dávila
Chief Curator

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