Mooie expo in het derde ‘filiaal’ van de Max Hetzler Galerie.

An artistic innovator, Hans Hartung (1904–1989) is renowned for his contribution to European post-war painting. Having already worked as an abstract painter before the Second World War, he developed a dynamic gestural style after 1945, and became one of the most important representatives of European Informel. His work is characterised by its spontaneous, emblematic compositions, which explore the interplay between colour field and line.

This exhibition presents an opportunity to rediscover Hartung’s extraordinary journey out of Germany and through Europe, arriving in Paris in 1936 where he fought against Nazism during the Second World War. Becoming severely wounded in battle in 1944, Hartung thought himself ruined in the aftermath of a traumatic conflict. However, in the 1950s, he became a central figure of abstraction on an international scale, and in 1960 he won the Grand Prix at the Venice Biennale, with a room dedicated to his work in the French pavilion.

In the first comprehensive show in Germany since Hartung’s 2007 solo exhibition Hans Hartung: Spontaneous Calculus, Pictures, Photographs, Film 1922–1989, at the Museum der Bildenden Künste in his native city of Leipzig, works spanning the artist’s oeuvre are on view: from the figurative watercolours and Informel ink drawings of the 1920s to the explosive aerosol paintings of the 1980s, and even his final painting T1989-N10, 1989, created one week after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Comprising about fifty works and a selection of memorabilia from his archives, this exhibition presents the exceptional variety of Hartung’s work, marked by a skillful blend of fervour and mastery of gesture.