Dellupi Arte opens its exhibition season with a show dedicated to three masters of abstract art: Hans Hartung, Toshimitsu Imai and Paul Jenkins.

From 9 November 2023 to 12 January 2024, Dellupi Arte will host in its spaces a tribute to these protagonists of the post-war period, each of whom was able to transform the pictorial language of abstraction with their own specificities. Presenting a selection of paintings, the exhibition focuses on works created exclusively between the 1950s and 1960s, representing a particularly creative moment in the research of the three painters, who were committed to combining innovative artistic techniques, lyricism and pictorial imagination.

Pioneers of the abstract language, Hartung, Imai and Jenkins were indispensable figures of the post-war art scene, profoundly influencing subsequent generations of artists.

From the 1960s onwards, Hartung refined the technique of ‘grattage’, which consists of scratching with various tools the still-fresh layer of paint that has just been spread on the surface of the canvas or intervening on baryta paper supports. The sign, the stylistic feature of his entire oeuvre, is transformed into a free flow of visual energy and immediate intuition, visible in the works on display characterised by a quivering and vital language. Exemplar of his art, a series of canvases are exhibited, most of them made between 1962 and 1963, such as the impressive T1963-H26, testifying to Hartung’s incredible compositional, chromatic and expressive variety.

“If the notion of complexity is about to replace the eminently classical notion of simplicity, the work that Imai proposes to us is the most apt to bear witness to this transition”. It is with these words that Michel Tapié describes Imai’s painting, an artist who, thanks to the French critic and his relations with Georges Mathieu and Sam Francis, succeeded in fusing the novelties of the European informal language with a typically Japanese sensibility. Among the canvases on show is the vibrant and dynamic Soleil, 1963, emblematic of his interest in the potential of colour and experimentation with pictorial matter, visualised in the artist’s gestural engagement with the canvas.

One of the most important American abstract post-war artists, Jenkins’ art is characterised by its powerful chromatic and compositional energy, consisting of superimpositions of colour nuances, opacity and transparencies. Avoiding the use of the paintbrush, the artist juxtaposes drips of colour, which he guides and spreads on the canvas with an ivory knife. In the monumental Phenomena of Octane (1959), the artist proposes his own definition of colour, light and space on the surface of the canvas, allowing the colour to flow freely to create unprecedented pictorial effects.