JK: Are there spontaneous activators for your intense examination of color and space? 

GH: The works arise out of my internal body memory. I approach the subconscious with color, material, and form. The pictures arise out of the movement of my body and the place where the pictures are created – always as a product of great inner concentration.

JK: Is your studio everywhere? Is it the whole world? How important is one’s own studio, as conventionally understood?

GH: After a very long existence, at a supposedly safe location, in an altered process of conscious I’ve fashioned the world for myself into an endless studio. My art follows my inner freedom, arises from an inner architecture of being, so to speak. Continued development unfolds in spurts, with no specific planning. When painting I must be open to all stimuli – the given surroundings, landscape, spaces – they have potential for producing a finished picture. This process is my „architecture of being”, which constantly changes, uncontrolled and free. I opted out of the prescribed life concept featuring yard and studio. You have to trust inner development, in fact you have to be open to a whole lot because, after all, you’re leaving firm ground and well-tried contexts. Consciousness development comes in spurts.

JK: Sometimes in your pictures I intuit a whole landscape, a whole country, the whole of nature? 

GH: Yes, an important example is the work „Try To My Subconscious”. It’s a large-format work over two meters high. Large-format works allow me to physically move and experience myself in a different way. Starting again and standing in front of a large canvas means you expend a lot of energy. To do it I need movement, in order that way to make the new place, the new landscapes and the surroundings my own and mentally realize them in the painting. By traveling and detecting power places I step into new interior worlds. Permitting new colors is part of it. I work with pigments and proprietary, self-produced mixtures and emulsions, which are highly vibrant and are a match for nature’s regularities quality-wise. Handling paints is a knowledge I’ve acquired over decades. The paints possess a high quality and density. The motivation to make the pictures I make is generated from deep within. It’s exertion and that arises from an internal pressure. Millimeter by millimeter I venture inwards and the result is the New, the new pictorial world.

JK: What’s the message of the picture titles? Are they interpretation, feeling, clarification, hint? Are you able to simply part from the things that accompany your life?

GH: If I had it my way, all pictures would be „No Title”, since the painting and the colors speak for themselves. I’m happy to leave freedom of interpretation to the viewer. Words, phrases, titles, on the other hand, have their own expression and identity. The title „Try To My Subconscious” is, however, an important title, since it has to do with exploration of the self and hence with the newly created product in the painting. We could call the catalog that. However, „Paso Doble” as catalog title permits more freedom and is more playful than a title about the subconscious. 

Things you part from aren’t only things. After all, these objects hold memories and life plans from past times. I’ve appropriated and realized places to my own ends through my large-format pictures. By traveling through Europe in my trailer these past two years I’ve learned that too many things obstruct freedom when your desire is to move. New things can arise that way.

JK: The ocean’s always in your pictures somehow. Is that the compulsion that allows you to work that way in the first place? 

GH: I worked directly by the sea and even slept on the cliffs. I experienced the ocean, its depths and endlessness for months and the picture „Ocean” is the result. The Jørn Utzon Foundation is situated right by the sea and is an enormously powerful place.

JK: Architecture, scale, dimension? It feels like your pictures fill whole buildings. A concretion of nature, landscape, ocean, odor, and feeling.     

GH: You have to be able to like places like those. They reflect nature’s process and hugely throw you back on yourself as a person, as a human. These places demonstrate that we’re the products of our own consciousness. To a different degree, directly experiencing nature in this immensity allows thoughts and freedom to come to you from within, which also influence precisely the pictures’ materiality and scale and understanding of existence. This power and intensity is also energetically transferred to the spaces, or respectively the architecture, where the pictures are going to hang. The works bring this freedom and these thoughts into whole buildings.

JK: Your pictures have an enormous density and intense materiality.

GH: Since I grew up in very extensive spatial freedom with animals, rocks, lime, and clay in the context of my grandfather’s tradition, history, and architecture, there were numerous opportunities to play and experiment with my own life surroundings. A strong materiality developed out of this. Even as a child I was intuitively able to play in „infinity” and do research into something without any specific goals. That’s probably also why I became an artist. My pictures’ limitlessness and scale are based on the whole surrounding area. 

It used to be my own life surroundings and these days I seek and find power places across the world, in order to develop that original experience further. This way I broaden my worldview and also my pictures’ expression.

JK: „When The Swallows Fly”. Ein großes, großartiges Bild. Voller Kraft, Tiefe und Energie.

GH: In den Jahren auf Gut Friedrichstein waren diese Schwalben ständige Begleiter. Auf den Balearen auch. Das war oft in meiner Erinnerung.

JK: Der Faltenwurf, ist das eine neue Dimension in einigen Bildern?  

GH: Einige Bilder sind in der freien Natur und am Meer direkt auf unbespannte Leinwände gemalt. Die Farben, Pigmente, Emulsionen und das Kasein habe ich teilweise zentimeterdick aufgetragen, die tagelang gebraucht haben, um zu trocknen. Durch das Klima, die Hitze und das Licht sind diese gewaltigen Falten entstanden.