Beate Höing

Beate Höing is an artist who lives and works in Coesfeld, Germany. She studied at the Freie Kunstakademie Rhein-Ruhr in Essen and Krefeld between 2001-2005. Since then, her work has been shown in solo shows in Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Denmark, and she has participated in over 150 group exhibitions.

Beate Höing—inspired by the ornamental and the textural material used in the cultural-historical folk art of fairy tales and myths as well as of traditions and rituals—took on these influences in her painting and ceramic work. Adopting them, she has created her own autonomous iconography. Whereby already inherent, associated, and recollected images come together in an ambivalent game of reality and fiction where dreams and nightmares, relief and dread lie side by side. Materiality and form are thus inseparably linked. Furthermore, the artist’s oil paintings and ceramic sculptures, including her installations, tell of a passion for the beauty, the delicacy, and the aesthetics of things, as well as a playful lust for all inborn possibilities.

Beate Höing’s paintings present a world of images in analogy to photographic sources from the 1970s and 80s. The intimacy of the moment-now is recorded piecemeal. A further work series depicts “headdresses,” also in oversized formats. The pictured motifs at first seem to be drawn from an intact and cozy world or documentation of bygone days. However, this tranquil idyll is deceptive, and a second glance exposes the world’s ambivalences and doublespeak.

This is likewise true for her ceramic works that, as an independent medium, are engaged in interaction with painting. The ceramic material indirectly calls up a taint of kitsch but also of traditional craftsmanship. This “thought-mix” counteracts the content-related statement that the artist almost provocatively intensifies. The incorporation of bric-a-brac and porcelain figures—for centuries the embodiment of bourgeois taste, loved as decorative items or souvenirs or dismissed as kitsch—offer adequate space for the imagination and the fantastic. Maidens and youths, fairy-tale and fabled creatures or animals asleep or dreaming: these fragile figures grow out of floral and opulent pedestal elements, stand on their own, and present themselves in figural arrangements that interact with painting.

Beate Höing’s works cast a very poetic, at times ironic, glance onto the past, telling of nostalgic memories, dreams and surreal worlds, complete with an oft whimsical twinkle of her eye.

Text by Jutta Meyer zu Riemsloh M.A. Translation by Jeanne Haunschild, Bonn.

Visit Beate Höing’s website and Instagram page.