ANRA - ANDREAS & RALPH HILBERT

                                    Twin brothers Andreas and Ralph Hilbert, born in 1976 in Waldshut / Baden Württemberg / Germany, work under the name ANRA and have been active artistically since 1996.

  After their self-taught self-study education they founded the ANRA 888 experimental space and after that have not set any limits on their creativity.  Since 1999 the brothers have been showing their work in numerous group and individual exhibitions at home and abroad. The twin brothers curated various kinds of shows, most notably the Beuys Birthday memorial exhibitions and other sociocultural kind of happenings. Since the beginning of 2018 they have been leading the A N R A artist's house Lottstetten where they are showing contemporary, national and international art.

   ANRA –  Trash Art is an art movement in which visual artists use mass products and garbage as starting material for their collages, sculptures and installations. This work is usually based on a subtext theme of consumerism or over consumerism or incautious consumerism. The art of ANRA is called eso & eco tRasH, where by the eso stands for esotericism/secret theory and the eco for economy, but also for ecologically frendly/environmentally friendly. Under the name ANRA eso & eco tRasH, the brothers work with finds (discarded waste) and create meaningful, aesthetic and socially critical but also mysterious and mystical works of art.  They are to create a social dialogue and to turn the negative “waste” into a positive.   The aim of at some point is to show only the positive because creativity will transform the negative. An example of this is an installation titled “Creativity eats war”.  A table is filled with banknotes, plates of weapons and soldiers, crumpled fragments and toxic waste warning signs and yet resembles a family dining table.

The art of ANRA revolves around aesthetics and beauty, a beauty that does not always conform to the ordinary ideal and is directed against speed and mass consumption.   The artists are taking a stand: They condemn the machinations of global players who, with their greed for power and world domination, are destroying our planet. Together ANRA stands for a peaceful, creative world where there is no place for violence and oppression.

  Since 2005 Andreas and Ralph Hilbert have been working on their self-created secret script, sometimes known as “twin speak”, a language only known to twins.  This ANRA code is used to write messages on everything from linen to tree bark.  They see it as a code that transmits positive messages and can be decoded by request.

The art of ANRA wants to sensitize the viewer, encourage them to think and in the best case bring about a change in our society.