Dimensions: support: 1850 x 3000 x 40 mm
Copyright: © The estate of Hans Hartung | CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 DEED, Photo: Tate
Curator: Here we have Hans Hartung's large, striking work, T1982-E15, currently residing in the Tate Collections. Editor: Immediately, I feel a primal energy emanating from those furious black strokes against the hazy background. It's almost violently expressive, isn't it? Curator: Hartung, known for his gestural abstraction, often channeled intense personal experiences into his art. The lack of explicit imagery invites us to project our own meanings onto the canvas. Do those chaotic strokes evoke feelings of freedom or perhaps constraint? Editor: I'm also considering how the work fits into the socio-political landscape of the 1980s. Could it reflect a reaction against the dominant power structures? Or the growing anxieties of the Cold War? Curator: Perhaps, or maybe the symbol here is the mark-making itself: the artist as a figure of individualistic heroism. Editor: Either way, the painting's ambiguity and rawness are its greatest strengths. Curator: I agree; it remains a powerful statement, regardless of specific interpretation.
Comments
Join the conversation
Join millions of artists and users on Artera today and experience the ultimate creative platform.
T1982-E15 is a large abstract oil painting in a horizontal format, which combines thick gestural strokes and splatters with a very smooth background. This background exhibits a continuous colour gradation that runs across the painting from left to right, beginning with a dark blue on the far left and proceeding through pale blue, dark red, another pale blue, light green and finally bright yellow on the right hand side of the composition. Aside from the red area, the background lacks any visible brushstrokes and the paint is applied very thinly. Although the transition between each of the background hues is not delineated by a clear boundary, the red section is differentiated by its distinctly uneven, curving edges, which contrast with the neater arrangement of the other tones. Laid over the red section is a large patch of gestural marks that are executed in black and a very dark blue paint, forming a loose block that runs vertically down the middle of the work and curves up towards the left, with several isolated flecks on either side of it. The textured appearance of these brushstrokes contrasts with the smoothness of the coloured background, and while they are densely arranged at the top of the painting, lower down and around the edges of the block they are generally more diffuse and there are areas in which the dark paint appears to have been scratched away.
CollectMore like this
