Ter Hell was born Horst-Günter Hell in Norden in 1954. His moniker could be a homage to his grandfather, the esteemed painter Willy ter Hell. A student of the Hochschule der Künste (University of the Arts) in Berlin (1976-1981, under Fred Thieler), Hell quickly used brash gestural and expressive lettering to set himself apart from the contemporary art scene.
The German Young Wild Ones and the Italian transavantgarde were the main influences of the time, from which ter Hell borrows loosely and insolently. From this contextual alphabet, as the artist himself puts it, he created his own vernacular. His choice of words holds meaning here, as writing is a seminal aspect of Hell’s oeuvre. What emerged from this initial borrowing was an ironic and often nihilistic world view translated into art. Even art itself, its definition, meaning and purpose are questioned. Artistically, this manifested itself through overly stretched and distorted canvases, crooked frames, incoherent materiality, in other words, a deconstruction of the medium of painting.
Punk music, which was emerging at the time, accompanied these experimental mistreatments where chaos eventually leads the way towards a sense of order. Sprayed mottos and graffiti, chronologically and aesthetically linked to the punk and rap genres of the 1980s, became more widely adopted in the art scene of the same era. Basquiat or Scharf made use of these common, everyday means of expression, with great success. A MoMA PS1 scholarship allowed Hell to travel to New York in 1982 and experience this subculture first hand.
In the period up to 1984, Hell’s work was too heavily informed by its context, by what directly concerned it. A change was afoot when black, white and red became the main chromatic trinity of his practice. Further changes would manifest themselves in the 1990s, when novel forms of media consumption once again redefined the perception of art as a whole. Hell never sought to depict the world around him, but rather to study, absorb and reproduce a series of atmospheres, where order and disorder reign, battling each other.
To that end, Hell continues to be in tune with his surroundings, striking a balance between being critical and inspired. A case in point was the advent of computers and digital technologies, which he began embracing, questioningly, as early as 1995. To this day, as digital information is our main source of information, Hell continues to explore the aesthetic possibilities of zeros and ones.
This critical mindset geared towards contemporary society is down to the fact that Hell considers that, as an artist and citizen, his duty is to resist. To quote him directly: ‘The meaning of my artistic work exists in the attempt to find a place from which I can somehow confront brainwashing, corruption, and capitalism’.
Ter Hell lives and works in Berlin.
