Gregor Hildebrandt German, b. 1974
"Hildebrandt is the poet of analogue media — he extracts cassette tape and vinyl from their obsolescence and weaves them into paintings that are also encoded songs, invisible and inaudible, waiting to be played."
Gregor Hildebrandt (born 1974, Bad Homburg, Germany) is a Berlin-based artist whose paintings, sculptures, and installations transform analogue recording media — cassette tape, vinyl records, VHS tape, compact discs — into lyrical, music-infused works that occupy the borderline between abstraction and conceptual art. By physically unspooling and embedding the magnetic tape of specific recordings into his canvases, Hildebrandt makes visible music that was invisible, encoding particular songs or films into works that cannot be heard but can be felt. Represented by Galerie Perrotin (Paris/New York) and Galerie Max Hetzler (Berlin), his work is held at the Centre Pompidou, the Berlinische Galerie, and the Rubell Family Collection.
"The cassette tape carries a song inside it — time, sound, memory, compressed into a thin magnetic strip. When I unwind it and press it into paint, the painting becomes something that listens."
Gregor Hildebrandt was born in 1974 in Bad Homburg, West Germany. He studied at the Universität Mainz (1995–1999) and then at the Universität der Künste (UdK) in Berlin from 1999, where he was a student in the painting class. He has been a professor for Painting and Graphics at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich since 2015.
Hildebrandt's practice centres on the physical properties of analogue recording media as artistic material. He works primarily with magnetic cassette tape and vinyl records, which he sources and selects for the specific musical or cinematic content they carry. His signature process involves applying strips of unspooled cassette tape to primed canvases in carefully controlled patterns — diagonal bands, grids, woven surfaces — using the magnetic coating as a kind of monochrome paint. The resulting works resemble abstract paintings or minimalist monochromes, yet they are in fact encoded recordings: the same cassette tape that produces the visible surface also carries, within its magnetic particles, the specific music that inspired the work.
A second process produces what Hildebrandt calls "positive and negative" editions: covering a canvas with vertical strips of self-adhesive tape, he paints patterns with a translucent fixative, then applies audio or video tape. When removed, the magnetic coating adheres to the unfixed portions, leaving an impression on the first canvas — which then becomes the "negative" — while the remaining tape is applied to a second canvas, the "positive." This method produces dual works that are simultaneously mirror images and inversions of each other.
His work is infused with the aesthetics and emotional vocabulary of post-punk, new wave, and independent music — a romanticism about loss, memory, and the materiality of sound. He lives and works in Berlin. His work is held at the Centre Pompidou, the Berlinische Galerie, the Rubell Family Collection, and major private collections worldwide.
Major exhibitions: Galerie Perrotin, Paris & New York (multiple solo exhibitions); Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin; Museum Villa Stuck, Munich; Kunsthalle Mannheim.
Works in public collections: Centre Pompidou, Paris; Berlinische Galerie, Berlin; Rubell Family Collection, Miami.
Teaching: Professor for Painting and Graphics, Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Munich (since 2015).
Selected bibliography: Gregor Hildebrandt: Ich habe einen Koffer in Berlin, Distanz Verlag, 2012; Gregor Hildebrandt, Perrotin, 2020.