(Leipzig 1904–1989 Antibes)
T1989-E21, 1989, signed and dated on the reverse; inscribed 26.2.89 / Phc 4.3.89 / Ph AB 40 du 1.3.89 on the reverse, acrylic on canvas, 200 x 250 cm, framed

This work is registered in the Fondation Hans Hartung et Anna-Eva Bergman, Antibes and it will be included in the Catalogue raisonné de l’Oeuvre de Hans Hartung currently being prepared.

Provenance:
Galerie Sapone, Nice (photo-certificate available)
Galleria Arte 92, Milan
European Private Collection

Exhibited:
Milan, Galleria Arte 92, Hans Hartung, 2002, exh. cat. p. 65 with ill.

A resolute advocate of abstraction, Franco-German artist Hans Hartung is considered one of the most important representatives of European art informel. Beginning in the 1930s and evidenced throughout his work is a turning away from figurative painting and towards experimentation with abstract forms and patterns. For Hartung, the intuitive, emotional gesture of painting takes centre stage. And even if his early works seem to be spontaneously and expressively thrown together, they are the result of a meticulous and consciously thought-through creative process.

He only really worked spontaneously in his later years, establishing a technique of splattering and spraying as well as the use of acrylic paint through these works. The fine tips of brushes would be replaced by compressed air pistols, brooms, rakes, bristles and palm fronds. Confined to a wheelchair due to a war injury, the artist used a wide variety of utensils, which he named and numbered — a kind of systematics and a gearing up to artistic production, which then proceeded relatively quickly.

In contrast to his early work, Hartung would now step away from the canvas and in the liberating distance thus created, would seek to conjure into being phenomena of colour and light. It is precisely this interplay of light and shadow, structure, texture and airiness that would become the formative elements of his later works. To do so, the artist developed a scratching technique by etching out the wet paint with a billhook, foregrounding thereby the brightness of the carved-out trace. Turbulence and antithetic sensations would be let into the work in this way, with the introduction of light. The artistic vocabulary spans the whole range of emotions: some works radiate calm, others melancholy, fierce dynamism, order or disorder.

The work T1989-E21, created in the year of the artist’s death, is characterised by precisely such dichotomy. On the left is a light grey sloping cluster of lines sprayed on against a light, airy background. Standing out on the right is a dark tangle of black dots and strokes overrunning a green background. The antipoles interpenetrate but timidly, complement each other, dynamically. A compact red colour field in the middle of the lower edge of the picture serves as a point of connection, interlocking the two units into a whole through its density and presence.

I am driven by the desire, the veritable passion, to leave the trace of my gesture on canvas or paper. It is about the act of painting, of drawing, of scratching, of scraping.
Hans Hartung