untitled 2008, 220 x 170 cm, oil on canvas

Thus Paul Klee's central idea that art does not render the visible, but makes visible, is clearly manifested especially in Simone Haack's supposedly realistic pictures. Although her paintings follow the rules of realistic painting, they still establish a reality which we associate with dreams, memory and imagination. This impression is strengthened by the artist abandoning a spatial involvement in the representation. Simone Haack's figures are often placed into a space- less nowhere – stimulating associations and the viewer's fantasy.
Only rarely are the figures looking for direct confrontation as in the example given by the young woman. With this painting the artist touches the genre of portrait art, and yet
the personality of the portrayed is not in the centre. The image does not remain in the individualistic, but tries to capture, in the young woman's gaze, a universal element of human life. The expression strongly recalls Marlene Dumas' painting series Female (1992/93). Both artists place the human figure in the centre of their artistic exposition and abstain from working with life-models. Instead, they use photographic models. Life-models irritate both Simone Haack and Marlene Dumas, who comments: "I then loose the freedom
of the amoral touch which to me is the pre-condition of a good painting."1
With Simone Haack, the "good painting" is always also a beautiful one, which refers the viewer back to himself, because "the beauty of painting is its permanence in the exclusive present: The unbelievable intensification in a single moment of inverse perspective because the painting penetrates us, awakens our remembrance, activates our memory, and viewing elucidates the images of ourselves." 2