HANS HARTUNG

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, Nanjing 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.

The show will be accompanied by a full-color catalogue with an essay by Professor Lao Zhu, Beijing University, Beijing, China.