Name: Pip Culbert and Gerhard Hoehme: Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed
Start: 2026-09-18T15:00:00+02:00
End: 2026-10-24T20:00:00+02:00
Location: VAN HORN

A Dialogue about Memory, Material, and New Meaning

With Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, VAN HORN opens an exhibition in Düsseldorf that brings together two artistic positions in a dialogue that is both precise and poetic. For the first time, the works of Pip Culbert and Gerhard Hoehme meet in a joint presentation. Both artists work with found materials, traces of use, and the ability of art to transform the mundane into a new aesthetic experience.

Material as a Carrier of Memory

The title refers to an English saying that connects luck, memory, and new beginnings. This is exactly where the exhibition begins: Culbert transforms shirts, bags, tents, and fabrics, while Hoehme works with color, string, plastic tubes, and drawing. What initially appears disparate unfolds in the space a common language of reduction, displacement, and questioning. From the available, something independent emerges; from the used, a new image.

Gerhard Hoehme and the Openness of the Image

Gerhard Hoehme is one of the important representatives of abstract art and Informel in Germany. His works are not perceived as closed objects, but as open fields of energy, whose effect only unfolds in the relationship between work, space, and viewers. The line becomes a spatial event for him, the image transforms into an installation, and painting turns into a movement of thought. This attitude gives the exhibition a special tension between intimacy and expansion, between work observation and spatial immersion.

Pip Culbert and the Poetic Transformation of the Ordinary

Pip Culbert, born in 1938 and passed away in 2016, is one of those artists who have radically sharpened the view of textile and used materials. In her art, clothing, fabrics, and everyday objects step out of their original context and become carriers of memory, physicality, and social experience. Especially in juxtaposition with Hoehme, it becomes evident how a delicate vocabulary of abstraction and closeness emerges from the estrangement of the familiar.

Curatorial Quality and Exhibition Atmosphere

VAN HORN is known as a gallery with a clear stance towards the present and art historical depth. The exhibition fits into a program that places young, mid-career, and older positions from the Düsseldorf and international context into new relations. In the exhibition atmosphere, quiet materials, subtle tensions, and a concentrated spatial effect are likely to dominate. Those who engage with the works experience not a loud staging, but a precise form of cultural education through art.

Why a Visit is Worth It

This exhibition promises an art experience for everyone who appreciates material art, abstract positions, and art historical references. It offers a glimpse into two artists who ask the same question with different means: How does a thing become an image, a remnant a sign, a memory a new presence? Exactly therein lies the strength of this presentation. Anyone interested in contemporary art, Informel, installation, and the poetic power of material should definitely see this exhibition live.