Ladies and gentlemen, dear friends of art,

Today we are faced with images that cannot simply be consumed – they challenge us, they open up inner spaces, they move beyond what is unambiguous. Hella Ridder’s works are not depictions of the world, but rather fields of experience for what lies beneath the surface – vibrating, floating, condensed.

Her painting is a lively dialog between form and dissolution, between surface and atmosphere, between traces of memory and visionary departure. It is the expression of an artistic way of thinking that is entirely dedicated to the process – the visualization of inner states, the exploration of perception

One comparison that suggests itself – and which places the depth of Hella’s work in an art-historical field of tension – is that with William Turner. Turner, this great maverick of English painting, was one of the first to consciously transcend the boundaries of the visible.

His pictures show landscapes, light, weather – and at the same time they are echoes of inner movement.

Turner melts the form, transforms nature into radiation, into blurriness, into pure atmosphere.

And even more: he no longer paints what is – but what is felt, sensed,

can be interpreted.

Hella Ridder also follows this path. She creates pictorial worlds that cannot be explained, but that unfold – before our eyes, but above all within ourselves. Her compositions breathe, they fluctuate between density and lightness, between attraction and dissolution of boundaries.

Areas of color enter into relationships, repel each other, float freely. They are not representational narratives, but painterly spaces of possibility.

While Turner understood light as a metaphysical force, Hella Ridder works with color as an emotional resonating body. Her pictures are not illustrated, but evoked – like memories that emerge before you can grasp them. Her power lies in this openness.

Hella Ridder does not construct pictorial spaces – she creates them.

And this is precisely where the connection lies: both Turner and Ridder are committed to the processual. Both believe in painting as an independent language that transforms rather than describes. They invite us to get involved – with the ambiguous, the fleeting, the perceptible.

Hella Ridder’s visual worlds cannot be read – they have to be lived through. They are poetic, but never sentimental. They are precise in their freedom. And they speak to us – on a level that lies beyond language.

At a time when pictures are often loud, garish and functional, this painting is a gift. It gives us depth, stillness, expanse. It reminds us that art can be a space – not of explanation, but of experience.

Wilhelm Bühse