VALLE GLEN, CA.- The Art Gallery at Los Angeles Valley College is presenting Seen But Not Heard: Paintings by Margarete Hahner, opening Tuesday, April 14, 2009. The exhibition, which runs through May 14, 2009, presents recent oil paintings done primarily on 331/3rd vinyl records. The subjects of these unusual paintings range from human figures and small animals, to depictions of color systems. These images are painted sometimes on a single record or sometimes on as many as forty records that are overlapped to form a single image.

More often Hahner's paintings are done on a series of records, one after the other, in which the image changes from one record to the next. The result is a visual metamorphosis somewhat like perceiving an optical illusion as one thing, and then suddenly seeing it as something entirely different - though in her work the transition is gradual. Hahner says, "I often think that I'm painting one image, when another emerges. I like the transformation, and I somehow want to capture it."

To further explore her ideas of visual transformation, Hahner has also used her painted records as the equivalents of animation cells to produce short movies of her ever-changing images.

Hahner, who is based in Los Angeles and Berlin, has had 15 one-person shows (mainly in Berlin). Her work also has been seen in a variety of group shows in Amsterdam, Hamburg, Potsdam, Munich, Berlin and Los Angeles, including The First Annual LA Weekly Biennial at Track 16 in 2005.