Claudia Hinsch

Claudia Hinsch is an artist from Germany who makes sculptures, collages, and drawings that often reference the idea of landscape. Her collages and assemblages sometimes feature images of landscapes clipped from magazines or brochures combined with other, “unnatural” elements: a glob or swath of brightly-colored paint, a silver-leafed branch. In her approach to sculpture, Hinsch often isolates a particular landscape feature—branch, puddle, thicket, shrub. This form may then become the point of departure for a new work created in the studio, using commercial materials such as plaster, house paint, fiberboard, and jute. At her show at the Locker Plant in December 2007, Hinsch exhibited a number of new works. Front and center was a cardboard sculpture resembling a barrier or reef, propped up by a silvered tree branch. Behind this, a green wall painting emanated outward from the corner of the room, stretching nearly floor to ceiling and providing a verdant backdrop for the cardboard piece. Nearby stood a work featuring a plaster moonscape of sorts, mounted on sawhorses and sporting dangling funnels. In another corner, Hinsch constructed a sort of Beckettian still-life: a second silvered, spindly tree branch reared up from an orange tarp and pointed toward a montage of tiny, generic landscape photos (all clipped from magazines) mounted on the wall. The sculptures in the show were constructed from a few spare elements: they were simply and elegantly configured. But they displayed an impish side too, with their radiantly artificial hues and incorporation of the organic into the organic, the “real” into the “fake.”

Claudia Hinsch was born in Ahrensburg, Germany, in 1966. She studied fine arts at the HFK Bremen and the Kunstakadamie Dusseldorf. She has received a scholarship from the Kulturstiftung Stormarn (2004) and an award from the Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven. Hinsch has participated in many group shows in Germany and has had solo shows at Speicher U75, Düsseldorf, Best Kunstraum, Essen, and Kunsthalle, Wilhelmshaven. She lives in Hamburg with her family.