In the exhibition “Hans Hartung. Beyond Abstraction”, running from November 23 2018 to January 26 2019, the Dellupi Arte gallery, located in Milan inside the complex designed by Daniel Libeskind, in the Citylife district – a new center of attraction for contemporary art and design – retraces about forty years of research carried out by the French-German artist through a careful selection of artworks created in diverse moments of his professional life.
As the curator Ilaria Porotto discloses: “The richness of production and the variety of the applied technical solutions, combined with an urge for experimentation, concertedly identify Hans Hartung as one of the most significant figures among leading artists in abstract art. His art – free from bonds and labels – typifies Post-War art, exerting its influence on generations of younger artists “.
This second exhibition dedicated to Hartung by Dellupi Arte, is a survey of about twenty significant oeuvres: fifteen masterpieces on canvas, accompanied by a selection of refined works on paper. The project unfolds following a time path: starting off from the works dating back to the 1950s, characterized by the prevailing of a strong symbolic language; it then focuses on the 1960s and 1970s, when Hartung develops new techniques and experiments unusual tools to scratch, dig, imprint the surface of the canvas. The exhibition also includes works executed in the 1980s, the paintings of his maturity: Hartung’s most lyrical creations where the gesture is unconditionally free.
The artworks reveal the vibrating and vital pictorial gesture through which Hans Hartung states the form of his language. This is manifest in peculiar works, as T1962-L8, T1963-R42 or T1965-E3 -all of them executed in the early 60s – where the artist uses common tools and everyday objects such as rollers, brushes, branches and garden rakes, besides an airbrush, sprays and compressors.
Thus, Hartung elaborates a very personal stylistic and operativemodum. In masterpieces like T1962-U4, which is also on display, a cloud of indefinite colour disperses into a spatial depth populated with sinuous or nervous lines, which are juxtaposed or intertwined with one another, scratched into the pictorial layer. At the same time the painting is transformed into some primordial energy and lyric experience: a kind of art that is completely abstract, deprived of any type of reference, even in the title; but a stepping stone towards the infinite, capable of arousing emotions and generating beauty.
“Hans Hartung. Beyond Abstraction” rounds up with the acrylics dated 1980s that describe one of the probably most fascinating moments in the artist’s career, where the signs and scratches express a harmonious potential that culminates in unexpected poetic heights in which reminiscences of nature and the landscape can be recognized.
The exhibition is sealed in the catalogue published by the gallery, where the images of the works on display are blended with a text by Ilaria Porotto.