Galleries in Paris

This Summer, Perrotin Paris presents an in-depth exploration of this era of Hartung’s work, divided into seven sequences and organized by form and technique. The period is too little-known, despite the full scope of the artist’s 2019 retrospective at the Musée d’art moderne de Paris. The 1980s high-lighted Hans Hartung’s ultimate achievement of his abstraction: liberty of form, maximum energy of the line, associations between accident and virtuoso mastery.

Between the ages of 75 and 85, Hartung developed and renewed his techniques in his atelier in Antibes, where he had a space suitable for these experiments. The artist was physically diminished by both old age and an amputation following the war, yet he maintained a tremendously vital psychology and energy; furthermore, being an established figure throughout the world, he sought no other satisfaction than to delight in producing the most inventive abstraction, emancipated from all external gazes.

Paintings from this period were exhibited in the past, during the 1980s and 1990s, but they experienced a long purgatory, critically speaking. Interest has recently been revived—driven, on the one hand, by institutional rediscoveries (through the exhibition Hartung and the Lyric Painters in Landerneau, as well as the acquisition of four works from 1989 by the Musée d’art moderne de Paris in 2016-2017). But it is also thanks to contemporary artists, who cite him with deep admiration: among them Christopher Wool, Katharina Grosse, and Larry Clark.