Artist - Gallery

Hans Hartung Works 1971 - 1976

Curated by Massimo Riposati - Limen 895 - October, 19 - 2011

play
Click to open the virtual tour

Art seems to me a way to overcome death H.H.

he international centrality of the work of Hans Hartung (1904-1989), from his early drawings of 1922 is known to all and has been widely documented in the great exhibitions created, by the Venice Biennale where in 1960 he won the Grand Prix for painting, to the National Museum of Modern Art in Paris in 1969, to the Metropolitan Museum in New York in 1975 to the Tate Gallery in London in 1996 and the numerous retrospectives that have been dedicated to him in museums around the world, from Berlin to Madrid, from Leipzig to Beijing, from Brussels to Taiwan and Nagoya to Japan.
The exhibition at the Limen Otto9cinque Gallery in Rome curated by Massimo Riposati and created in collaboration with the Hartung Foundation in Antibes and the Galerie Sapone in Nice exemplifies a moment that the artist himself defines: "Since 1970 I have a feeling of renewal. if a new strength, a new youth have been granted to me ".
Creating harmony from disharmony is Hartung's great challenge, and his whole life will be marked by the search for that rule that will allow him to bring the indispensable disharmonious accents back into a lasting balance.
Matured in love for Rembrandt and in admiration for Emil Nolde and Kokoschka, he did not let himself be seduced by the Bauhaus and the geometric lessons of Kandinsky, whom he had also met in Paris in the 1930s and with whom he exhibited at the Pierre gallery in 1936. Far from the beginning, from every figurative hypothesis Hartung found in the harmonic rule of the golden section the compromise between his design rigor and his innate desire for speed in expression, because Hartung's painting abandons the image but not reality and writes: "A reality that is different for me, but still a reality. As for my painting, I believe that it maintains a relationship, indeed constant but very complex relationships, with what it has been agreed to call the external reality" and again: "Painting has therefore always presupposed for me the existence of reality: this reality which is resistance, momentum, rhythm, push, but which I do not totally understand that when I grasp it, I surround it rivo, I immobilize it for a moment that I would like to see last forever ".
Undisputed master of the lyrical abstraction Hartung, he influenced many of the informal experiences of the immediate post-war period, and he can be considered a European artist: German-born and naturalized French, he lost his leg fighting in the Foreign Legion against Nazism and painfully against his country; he traveled to Italy, crossing it as a boy on a bicycle, married in 1929 Anna-Eva Bergman, a Norwegian artist, in '39 he married the Spanish Roberta Gonzales and again, after a second divorce, in 1953 Anna-Eva Bergman, returned to Paris from Norway.
Since 1994 his home / studio has become the seat of the Hans Hartung and Anna-Eva Bergman Foundation, an extraordinary study and research center on one of the Fathers of Contemporary Art.


© Toni Garbasso