Helene Appel’s paintings deal in trompe l’oeil technique, but rather than the grand architectural versions of the Renaissance, or the convoluted visual games of seventeenthcentury Dutch painting, Appel instead focuses on the determinedly banal. Her depictions of objects are always rendered on a one-to-one scale and the canvas is fitted to the size of the subject. In this way a painting of a cut of meat will be quite diminutive in scale, whereas the precise rendering of a fabric curtain can be monumental. In the two paintings acquired for the Williamson Art Gallery & Museum, Birkenhead, Appel’s hyper-realism reveals itself as self-consciously painterly. The raw linen support onto which she paints announces the artifice at work and nods to the history of a medium that includes still life and landscape. The soap bubbles and individual grains of sand are painted with a loving exactitude that is viscerally compelling for the viewer, while operating within such a restrained tonal range that they have a very contemporary, minimalistic resonance.
The Williamson’s art collection has been built over the last century with a strong emphasis on British artists, especially those with a regional connection. This was an opportunity to include an artist with strong British links, through the Royal College of Art, but one with an international reputation and perspective. The subject matter of the paintings (sand and water) has a direct relationship to the local landscape – Wirral being a peninsula bounded on two sides by extensive beaches – and to the existing collection with its wide range of seascapes and coastal scenes. Helene Appel’s paintings offer a different approach to subjects favoured by so many local artists who feature in exhibitions both at the Williamson and other venues in the area.
