de Sarthe Gallery is pleased to announce a landmark exhibition of Hans Hartung’s paintings. This is the first showing of Hartung’s works in Hong Kong although, Hans Hartung’s work is no stranger to Asia as he has been exhibited at the Taiwan Museum of Art, Taichung in 1997, the Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art, Nagoya, Japan in 1998 and the Palais des beaux-arts, Beijing and the National Museum, Nankin in 2005. This exhibition features 7 major large paintings from 1962 to 1975. The exhibition will focus on the works from the early 60s onwards which demonstrate a new period characterized by scrapings in the still wet paint which allows the canvas to show through. This exhibition will also focus on Hartung’s connection to calligraphy as demonstrated in the text by Professor Lao Zhu, included in the catalogue of the de Sarthe Gallery exhibition. The appearance of interlacing and extremely delicate undulations which are tangled, give the illusion of bars, scratching and streaks. The lines gradually disappear replaced by dark masses — like threatening smoke — without any graphic character, whose tones are superimposed against a lighter background, on large canvases.
Hartung’s work becomes stripped of any reference to the exterior world or anything that might reflect a state of mind, «we enter,‖ Hartung tell us, ―the unknown, a zone that has yet to be created... internal movements can be a basis, just an incitement... » In 1969 Hartung started to use, for the first time, vibrant colors such as lemon yellows, intense blues, brick reds, light greens and the ever present black, lending expression to a poetic inspiration which commands the gesture.
Born in Leipzig, Germany on Sept. 21, 1904, the son and grandson of physicians, Hartung was one of the few painters of his day who thought almost from the outset in purely abstract terms. In 1927, He did ―dripped drawings‖ 20 years before Jackson Pollock who was 15 at that time.
Initially self-taught as an artist, and reportedly unaware of the existence of earlier abstract painters, Hans Hartung studied philosophy and art history at Leipzig University and later attended art schools in Leipzig, Dresden, and Munich. The basic elements of his pictorial language were apparently formed by the time he was 18. The first exhibition of Hartung’s works took place in November 1931 at the Kühl Gallery in Dresden.
An adherent throughout his life of a subjective, spontaneous, gestural form of abstraction, he worked mainly in Paris during the 1930's. After a brush with the Nazi regime in Berlin in 1935, he returned to Paris and volunteered at the outbreak of World War II for the French Foreign Legion. He lost his right leg in action in 1944. Granted French nationality in 1946, he became a leading member of the abstract wing of the School of Paris after 1945.
He came to be regarded in Europe as the counterpart of the American abstract expressionists. He was invited to the first Documenta at Kassel, in 1955 and was awarded the International Prize at the Venice Biennale in 1960 and had a major exhibition of his paintings in 1975 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In 1972 he built a studio in Antibes (South of France) where he died on 14 December 1989.
His works are in the collections of major museums worldwide including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Museum of Modern Art, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Tate Gallery, London, Centre national d’art et de culture Georges Pompidou, Paris and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.
The show will be accompanied by a full color catalogue with an essay by Professor Lao Zhu, Beijing University, Beijing, China.
