K.H. Hödicke
Magic Window Cleaner

The edition piece Magic Window Cleaner demonstrates the function of a handheld window wiper – K.H. Hödicke, not without irony, borrows this name straight from advertising. Since 1965, K.H. Hödicke has used various glass squeegees, which appear in wall objects with painted window panes or other image surfaces, posing questions about the possibilities of painting itself. These objects can be read partly as a response to American Pop Art but, above all, they express Hödicke’s defiance of post-war German modernism, where Informel and abstraction had become the new doctrine. Almost demonstratively, Hödicke rejects painterly subjectivity and expressivity, disassembling the medium of painting into its basic elements. The glass, painted red on the reverse and framed in wood, appears to have been cleaned with the eponymous Magic Window Cleaner — yet the cleaning process is only half completed, and the cleaner itself remains behind the pane. The cleaned area merely reveals another red surface behind it.
K.H. Hödicke has participated regularly in Galerie Block exhibitions since its opening in 1964. By 1967 alone, the painter had been featured in three solo exhibitions: Passagen. Verzerrungen (1965), Window Panes (1967) and Passage mit Fenstern (1967). These included paintings of shopping arcades and shop windows where the neon-lit Kurfürstendamm at night is distortedly reflected, with consumer goods shimmering through the displays. In the 1965 exhibition Passagen. Verzerrungen, Hödicke also installed a large pane of glass in the space, reflecting paintings, room, lighting and the movements of visitors. “As one passes by, sequences emerge; movement becomes visually perceptible. If the pane is painted or covered with film, the altered views and overlays of image on the pane, image through the pane, and image reflected by the pane produce constantly shifting combinations,” writes Peter O. Chotjewitz in the catalogue for Passagen. “While the pictures are two in one – both a differentiated phenomenon, that is, depicted reality and reality itself – the images in the pane are reality as such.”¹
The construction of the image and the relationship between reality and its representation continue to interest Hödicke in objects such as the multiple Magic Window Cleaner. These works explore painting beyond its conventions, revealing what lies in front of and behind the canvas. They quite literally demonstrate the interplay of opaque and transparent surfaces, of tangible picture support and illusionistic painting.
Text: Birgit Eusterschulte

¹ Peter O. Chotjewitz, »Veränderungen«, in: K. H. Hödicke. Passagen, Exhib.-cat., Galerie Block, 1965, n.p.