Setareh Gallery has the pleasure of presenting extraordinary works by Hans Hartung, the pioneer of gestural painting, for the third time in its gallery premises. In his abstract works extending over large parts of the twentieth century, the artist succeeded in creating another reality – another kind of reality that longs to be both experienced and pursued.
Bundles of delicate black lines on an almost transparent canvas tinted in light blue, vibrant shimmering tangles of unprompted colour fields, lines like ne grids, colossal bars and deep scratches on extensive canvases: Hartung produced dynamic pictorial worlds that appear reduced and almost calligraphic at the same time.
Hans Hartung is the most prominent representative of the abstract expressionism and was a relentless artistic experimenter. Exploring and playing with the possibilities of painting, he not only used small and large brushes but also feather dusters, paint rollers and scrapers as well as converted vacuum cleaners and spray cans, all of which provided him with a newly found freedom in his mature artistic output.
Hartung developed an entirely innovative, gestural form of abstraction. Characteristic of this new abstract style is a subjectivity that was hitherto unknown and greatly influenced the École de Paris and later inter- national art. For his works on canvas, he first produced preliminary sketches that formed the basis for his paintings full of spontaneous and expressive force. It was only from the 1960s onwards that Hartung fully liberated himself from his former mode of rigid pictorial composition. This new approach had a further reason, however, as he had been hard-pressed for money until shortly prior to the end of World War II, and painting in oil was expensive.
The Leipzig-born artist had taken courses in the method and materials of artistic work under Kurt Wehler and Max Doerner, both classic masters in this eld, in Dresden and Munich (1925–29). His curiosity led him to Paris, where he permanently moved to with his wife Anna-Eva Bergmann following a traumatic inter- rogation by the Gestapo in 1935. He joined the French Foreign Legion in 1939 and was a member of the troops in North Africa until 1944. That same year, he lost his right leg during the siege of Belfort. He took up painting again in 1945 after a six-year interruption. In the following year and on account of his bravery, he was awarded French citizenship and the Legion of Honour.
Hans Hartung was the prototypical European painter. He established a career after the war as one of the most important international artists of post-war modernity. He was represented at every documenta from 1955 to 1964, and received the Grand International Prize for Painting at the Biennale of Venice in 1960.
After moving to Antibes and despite his impaired mobility, Hartung continued painting well into old age, producing his characteristic large-format works, some up to five meters long – exquisitely aesthetic works, which appear so effortlessly painted yet radiate a distinct artistic intention and an irrepressible energy.
Hans Hartung not only provided his era with an original artistic language, but he also established a new form of artistic perception. Every individual work by Hartung has an invariable intensity that is impossible to evade.
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue.
