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Glastonbury artist Anne Hebebrand brings her abstract expressions of “Poetry in Color” to life in a new exhibition of her paintings continuing through March 6 at the Good News Cafe and Gallery.
Good News Cafe will welcome Hebebrand at an opening reception at the restaurant from 3 to 5 p.m. on Sunday, December 18. The public is cordially invited to meet the artist, view her exhibition, and learn more about her works.
Hebebrand’s show celebrates the poetic expressions that emerge from the subtle color combinations and graphic detail of her abstract oil paintings on paper and canvas. The artist observed that her artistic explorations of color, line and form are designed to create a visual choreography, creating a language and iconography all their own.
“I have developed my own complex language of symbols and shapes drawn from the unconscious to create poetic paintings rich in color and movement,” she said. “The paintings stress the importance of process and the materiality of paint, as well as the motional richness of color and the primacy of abstraction.”
Her paintings have drawn critical acclaim and feature coverage in regional and national publications including The New York Times, Hartford Courant and Hartford Advocate. In a recent review published by the journal “Art New England,” art critic Patricia Rosoff commented that what is most remarkable about Hebebrand’s work is her ability to “evoke a universe of color pregnant with nuanced touches.”
“A square of orange, for instance, glows as if through fog behind a field of saturated red,” Rosoff wrote. “Lines and snippets of other colors – pink, ochre, lavender, soft green – pass across the picture plane like the faint and trailing record of taillights in a nocturnal photograph.
“Hebebrand’s vocabulary, for all its carefully modulated restraint, is quirky and quick,” Rosoff added. “She’ll rake a little patch of overcolor to allow the field to read through. She’ll float a cooling shape of color on a sea of a warmer hue, without ever actually switching color families or bruising the integrity of her trembling picture plane. She’ll drag a line through seemingly impenetrable mists and let it submerge and reappear in a whimsical dance.”
Commenting on her creative process, Hebebrand said that she typically does not begin with a planned or preconceived idea for her new painting.
“I start off with a vague idea, and then develop the painting as I go along,” she said. “Each painting has gone through a series of transformations resulting in a multi-layered surface. I have always been fascinated with old walls where peeling paint reveals signs of a former life. Faint suggestions of shapes and colors are visible in the final painting, alluding to prior stages.”
Hebrebrand, a native of Germany who moved to Connecticut 12 years ago, traces her artistic roots back to the German impressionist painter Walter Leistikow, a great-great uncle, and Hans Leistikow, a great uncle renowned as a graphic designer during the Bauhaus period. She earned a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from the Boston Museum School, where she received the Dana Pond Award, and a master’s in art history from the University of Alabama. She has pursued post-graduate studies at the International School of Arts in Salzburg, Austria, and the Atlanta College of Art.
Her paintings have been selected for exhibition in several Connecticut museums and public spaces including the New Britain Museum of Art, the Mattatuck Museum in Waterbury, the Slater Museum in Norwich, and the Alexey von Schlippe Gallery at the University of Connecticut-Avery Point. Other exhibitions have been presented at the Artworks Gallery in Hartford, the Gertrude Herbert Institute of Art in Georgia, and the Boston Museum School in Massachusetts. Most recently her work has been shown at the Washington Art Association gallery in Washington Depot and the Ginger Druchyk Gallery in Glastonbury.
Prestigious private collections including Pfizer Inc. in Groton and Max Restaurant Group in Hartford include works by Hebebrand. She also serves as a contributing writer for Artis Magazine, a guest teacher at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, and a visiting artist with “Partners in Art and Education Revitalizing Schools,” a Hartford-based program sponsored by The Bushnell.
Additional information about the artist and images of her works can be accessed at Hebebrand’s website at www.annehebebrand.com.
The image on this page presents Anne Hebebrand's work “Amphora,” a 2005 oil painting on paper featured in her current show at Good News Cafe.
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