Hannah Dougherty: The Gartenhaus Project and Recent Works / Das Gartenhaus Projekt und Aktuelle Arbeiten, 2005/2006

The Berlin-based American artist Hannah Dougherty's strong, evocative paintings, collages and installations are characterized by a dreamy, mythological feel, as much from her distinctive palette as from her retro, hybrid figures, which take their inspiration from children's book illustrations, comic strips and 1950s advertisements, with a little bit of Dürer and old school Encyclopedia Brittanica thrown in. In her recent Berlin installation, The Gartenhaus Project, Dougherty glued handwritten notes and scraps of paper like a 1939 Berlin butcher's bill and a Japanese train schedule to her paintings, mostly upside-down, so that they functioned as barely legible memorabilia. She also created a kind of "theater set" representation of an Arcadian suburb, complete with dramatic twilight-evoking spotlights, kitschy prefabricated garden houses, pots of artificial flowers, stuffed fox and deer, and prop-like, anthropomorphized wooden birdhouses--much more sinister than jolly, like dark little garden gnomes. This volume documents The Gartenhaus Project in full.