Hysterically Real

1. Hysterically Real (United States: Internet, 2009) makes Conceptual artworks and performances. By applying a poetic and often metaphorical language, Real wants to amplify the astonishment of the spectator by creating compositions or settings that generate tranquil poetic images that leave traces and balances on the edge of recognition and alienation.

2. HR’s Conceptual artworks appear as dreamlike images in which fiction and reality meet, well-known tropes merge, meanings shift, past and present fuse. Time and memory always play a key role. By investigating language on a meta-level, HR often creates several practically identical works, upon which thoughts that have apparently just been developed are manifested: notes are made and then crossed out again, “mistakes” are repeated.

3. Hysterically Real’s works focus on the failings of communication, which are used to visualize reality, the attempt of dialogue, the dissonance between form and content and the dysfunctions of language. In short, the lack of clear references is a key element in the work. By manipulating the viewer to create confusion, HR tries to grasp language. Transformed into art, language becomes an ornament. At that moment, lots of ambiguities and indistinctnesses, which are inherent to the phenomenon, come to the surface.

4. HR works are on the one hand touchingly beautiful, on the other hand painfully attractive. Again and again, the artist leaves us orphaned with a mix of conflicting feelings and thoughts.

5. Hysterically Real currently lives and works in Buffalo, New York. HR is uncomfortable with all of these claims. HR is comfortable claiming to make picture books. HR is comfortable claiming to make poetry.