Links and other references

Hanno Rink on Artprice.com
Hanno Rink on Artfacts
Hanno Rink on Artland

Robert Gernhardt on Hanno Rink (R. Gerhardt on Wikipedia)

Zu Hanno Rinks Bildern – On Hanno Rink´s Paintings

The title of this exhibition comes from the painter Hanno Rink. He called it "Pictures on Pictures" - and we already catch the first shadows of something, erratically haunting the entire exhibition: an irritation. In common parlance, one can write a book or talk about pictures, but not make a painting on them. "Pictures of Pictures", " Pictures after Pictures "- that would be commonly understandable promises. We would imply that somebody would had painted a picture of pictures that surround him or that he had seen somewhere. But, what are we to expect of somebody who has taken it on himself (and us) to paint pictures on pictures – unless he doesn't want to simply paint them on top of each other? So, this is going to be tricky. The painter claims something for the picture what is usually reserved for the word: that it is capable for reflection or arguments. A literary critic traditionally uses the same medium as the object of his critic: words. Can one imagine an art criticism formulated in pictures? Sure. One can imagine a lot. But is it paintable?
In any case is the one who paints "pictures over pictures" without the innocence that a history of art can only imagine in such a way that viewing habits are constantly questioned, norms are broken and technologies are revolutionized. These advances were called avant-garde in still unknown artistic territory at a time when it was still believed to know where the arts were in front and behind, and what a right-wing avant-garde was was only allowed to do so from the images behind him know a lot that such pictures could in no way undermine him. At least the images and image inventions of the period just past, just recently overcome or believed to have been overcome were absolutely taboo - Expressionism differed sharply from Impressionism, New Objectivity from Expressionism, Abstract Painting from New Objectivity, Tachism from the 1950s from abstraction the 30s and the 40s and so on -: Every ten years a new direction was proclaimed, and each of these directions believed to have had the unique compass for a decade until the last hour reliably hit it, a radical one Change of direction once again made everything that had been painted look old, and once again it said: You should not make a portrait that remotely reminds you of any portrait made so far.
An innovation fury that strangely raged at a time when the knowledge of what had already become a worldwide picture had expanded in an unprecedented way, thanks to ever refined reproduction techniques and by means of constantly expanding visual media . Perhaps the ban on image perception and the prohibition of image display were a defiant reaction by the artists to the increasingly swelling flood of images surrounding them - but it could actually only be a matter of time before the flood of images would itself be the subject of images, a flood of images that of course is far from being more fed only from painted pictures, but mainly from photographed and filmed ones.
In the mid-1960s, the time had come: the pop artists made pictures from pictures, Warhol from photos, Lichtenstein from comics, Jasper Johns from familiar symbols such as flags or numbers - but were these already pictures about pictures?
In any case, since then, German artists have also used the images as image content with increasing curiosity, judges blurred black and white photos, Polke of the 1950s modemism up to the 1950s deco material as image carrier and quotation . They all paint pictures, which innocently mentioned innocence has been lost, and yet Hanno Rink goes one, two - maybe a few - steps further in this way. It keeps going because it keeps going back. He continues a game that began with what could be called Western painting, the game of deception. The Latin Pliny already knows how to sing a song, and even in his time this song was an old song because it is about two rival painters from Athens: around 400 BC the famous Zeixis was already certain that his colleague Parrhasios was in a painter contest because real birds had tried to snack on his painted grapes. He had proudly asked his colleagues to finally pull the curtain aside in front of his picture, and when he looked at him contrite, he realized that this curtain was also painted: if he had only deceived unreasonable animals, his rival had succeeded , thanks to the mimesis, the art of imitation, to put him in, the great Zeuxis.
The Frenchman calls this game with the viewer trompe-i-oeil, deception, but sheer deception can only be said of the unreasonable animal. In the case of Zeuxis, not only his eye but also his mind was deceived because his curiosity to see his colleague's picture was greater than his vigilance. There is a qualitative difference between greed for grapes and curiosity for pictures. This game was continued for millennia, often dismissed as secular by clerics and insulted by inferiors of ideal painting as inferior without the painters ever giving it up entirely. In the 17th century, the trompe-i-oeil even celebrated a climax when the German Emperor Ferdinand III succeeded the Dutch. The painter Samuel Hoogstraten rewarded for a successful deception with a gold medal, whereupon scholarly judges of the time placed the emperor deceiver Hoogstraten above the bird deceiver Zeuxis and the Zeuxist deceiver Parrhasios.