Christine Hiebert is an orchestrator of encounters. Her abstract, often minimal drawings are an ecosystem of gesture and materials, a way to explore the conditions of being and beings in the world, human and other. For Hiebert, these drawings become a way of probing how individuals respond to their unstable environments. She works with traditional and nontraditional media to create both small- and large-scale drawings on paper. Since 2000, she has also created site-specific wall installations using tape and other materials, engaging dynamics of the human body and architectural spaces. Her compositions oscillate between minimal and teeming, vibrant and muted. Since incorporating color into her practice eight years ago, Hiebert has wielded it as a collaborator in abstraction, amplifying qualities of a gesture.
Hiebert’s drawings are events on the surface of paper in which gesture interplays with material to investigate the nature and language of line. Early study of typography and letterforms trained Hiebert in the nuance of gesture, and to see the subtle relationships between lines and their counterspaces. After spending time in the American West, where inconceivably slow movements of the earth can be visible in the sublime and climactic topography, Hiebert has embarked on other bodies of work in which she very consciously slows her gesture down. The resulting subtle, measured yet uncontrived marks have driven her practice forward. For Hiebert, each mark has its own character, and its own agency. Her marks are a psychological chain of circumstances that Hiebert enacts as a means to understand how one thing affects another. Her work, though bearing no intentional resemblance to the optics of nature, becomes a window into human nature, an ontological exploration through a scrupulous symphony of gesture.
Christine Hiebert was born in 1960 in Basel, Switzerland and grew up in near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. After diverse undergraduate studies that included typography, languages and fine art, she received an MFA in painting from Brooklyn College. In 2024, Hiebert was awarded a Gottlieb Foundation grant. Recent solo exhibitions include “zwischen” (Kunsthaus St. Josef in Solothurn, Switzerland, 2023), which featured a site-specific room-drawing in the apse of a former baroque church, in dialogue with drawings on paper, and “Restless” (Victoria Munroe Fine Art, New York City, 2021), which featured recent drawings in color. Her work has been shown at The Morgan Library and Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, The Drawing Center NY, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, MA and other museums in the U.S. and Europe. Past installation sites for monumental wall drawings include the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, Germany, and The Davis Museum at Wellesley College, in Wellesley, MA. Hiebert is based in Brooklyn, NY, working periodically in more remote parts of the United States.