HANS HARTUNG
In the footsteps of Hans Hartung
September 10 - December 19 2020 lEXTENSION
Opening Thursday, September 10 from 6 p.m.
The artist of the exhibition:
It's a long story that links Hans Hartung to the Berthet-Aittouarès gallery.
History with the place, since it is at this same address, in 1936, in what was still the Pierre gallery, that Hartung, for one of his first appearances on the Parisian scene, presented, at the invitation of Pierre Loeb, one of his paintings right next to a work by the man who would become one of his great friends, Jean Hélion.
History with the people who made and still make this place live because Michèle and Jean-François Aittouarès knew Hans Hartung in the 1980s, the painter having then welcomed them to his place of life and work, in Antibes. The exhibition held at the gallery in 2006, Hors champ, already bore the
traces of that history. The one that opens today too, even more deeply.
If the twenty works which are thus brought together accurately trace the path of Hans Hartung, they also reveal the view that Michèle and Odile Aittouarès, faithful in this to their line, have never ceased to have on it.
Twenty works therefore, not all of Hartung's work but limits, like essential points by which the artist pivots his work. For Hartung, painting is a perpetual renewal. It is the artist's ways of doing things that are thus given to view: the incisive line of the pastel, the jubilation of the Indian ink which spreads onto small pebbles painted on each of their faces, the scraping of the pictorial surface which was the decisive shift in his practice, at the beginning of the 1960s, but also, in the last years of the painter's life, the use of the broom, then of the garden sulphate, in order to create sumptuous works in which all the art of Hans Hartung is summed up.
Pastels from the 1950s where the authority of the gesture imposes itself even in the work
ultimate where the painting, projected on the canvas, oscillates between euphoria and the field of the swan, passing through the lacerated canvases of the 1960s where the light springs like a scar on a background of darkness, a man, faithful to his quest, deepens his trace.
It is the constancy of an artist who gives himself to be seen, through the prism of his metamorphoses. Constancy of a man of the line, who never ceases, in his own way, to draw paint. That this is shown in a gallery whose walls host, among others, the works of Jean Degottex and Henri Michaux, speaks well of the complicity between this work, this place, and those who animate it.
Berthet-Aittouares Gallery
14 and 29 rue de Seine
Tuesday Saturday
11:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. / 2:30 p.m. – 7:00 p.m.
T: +33 (0)1 43 26 53 09
