Helene Appel produces paintings on linen of everyday objects such as netting, blankets, stitches and floor sweepings. Appel’s paintings may be described as photorealistic by some, but in fact the artist explores the tension between faithful representation and the transformative possibilities in the process of painting. While certain items are intricately detailed and uncannily illusionistic, a sheet of transparent plastic is convincingly communicated in a few decisive brushstrokes, emphasising a matter-of-factness in the simplicity of application, which often verges on minimal deliberation with the brush. In Appel’s images, it is clearly paint media that we are observing.

Appel applies a forensic gaze to familiar objects from an aerial view: the full-to-the-brim kitchen sink, uncooked pasta, a puddle of spilled water, a piece of red fabric. The discarded, the incidental and the domestic are represented objectively and yet, the very act of painting these motifs admits tender attention. The decorative lines of a tea towel or the coarse fabric of a blanket begin to blend, through a studied combination of both painterly media and gesture, with the weave of the raw linen below. “Helene Appel exchanges her attention and labour for the specific and individual characteristics that her painted objects reveal over the time that she exposes herself to them,” writes Anna-Catharina Gebbers in the catalogue accompanying the artist’s 2011 solo exhibition at the Mönchehaus Museum Goslar. “For every glance and brush stroke that she dedicates to her subject, she receives in exchange a further discovery of another of its particularities.”