Toulu Hassani: Fall Back Into Place
“The title indicates the time the photograph used as a reference was taken. To be precise, details about the location and date of the photograph are missing. However, I’m not interested in the most precise representation possible. The term ‘above horizon’ comes from astronomy and, to me, it highlights that everything we observe, no matter how large or small, can only be described from our perspective. The night sky is mapped, and we know what can be seen around us, yet our own planet is in the way. The starry sky itself is something I associate with many things. At night, everything around us disappears into darkness, and the tiny stars in the distance magically attract my gaze. Thoughts seem freer and clearer at night than during the day, and at the same time, everyone is probably familiar with the thoughts of how small and insignificant we are as humans in the dimensions of the universe. Simultaneously, there is a great fascination for unsolved mysteries. Things and dimensions that surpass our imagination. The star paintings are perhaps an attempt to deliberately evoke such a moment.”
– Toulu Hassani on her series “above horizon“
in a 2024 interview with Sophie Azzilonna for the Stadler Collection
Over the past fifteen years, Toulu Hassani has developed a painterly practice in which lines, pencil marks, geometric forms, and mathematical structures converge into a dense, regulatory network of images. Within these pictorial worlds, the artist articulates moments of identity formation that place the individual human subject in direct relation to overarching universal forces beyond imagination. Natural-scientific references—particularly from astrophysics—serve as recurring points of orientation within Hassani’s work. In her fourth solo exhibition at Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle, titled “Fall Back Into Place“, her established grid paintings in oil encounter large-format celestial constellations and small-format airbrush works. Together, these three groups articulate a painterly cosmos that navigates the tension between order and disorder, system and randomness. The material must prove itself to intuition on the substrate. Thus, geometric patterns or ornamental lines are often found closely spaced together in these works, which after prolonged viewing collapse in their own logic. Sudden changes of direction cause the viewer to abandon the search for a resolution to a system without answers. The exhibition title “Fall Back Into Place“ describes a moment in which order reemerges after a period of chaos and takes its cue from a refrain in “Space Song” by the French-American band Beach House. This notion resonates strongly in the constellation paintings from the series “above horizon“, in which times of day are indicated and viewers are confronted with fragments of the starry night sky—an encounter that evokes the humbling relationship between humanity and the vastness nature.
