Image: Museum Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden
Museum Frieder Burda in Baden-Baden is presenting an exhibition organized by the museum with support from the Archives Simon Hantaï in Paris. The exhibition brings together around 40 key works spanning four decades of Hantaï’s practice.
The show includes loans from the Musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, Fondation Gandur pour l’Art in Geneva, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Musée d’art moderne de Paris and Musée d’art moderne et contemporain de Saint-Étienne. From 1960, Hantaï focused his experiments on ‘pliage comme méthode’, covering folded canvases with oil or acrylic paint to produce luminous accidental patterns.
The exhibition emphasizes how Hantaï repeatedly recombined color, unpainted canvas and the pliage method. One example is ‘Étude’ from 1969, an oil-on-canvas work measuring 273.2 by 236.5 centimetres and lent by Fondation Gandur pour l’Art in Geneva.
Another large-scale work is ‘Tabula’ from 1980, an acrylic-on-canvas painting measuring 236 by 392 centimetres. Born in 1922, Hantaï emigrated from Hungary to Paris in 1948 and moved from an early Surrealist phase toward Informel painting in the 1950s.
Hantaï received France’s Grand Prix National des Arts Plastiques in 1980 and represented France at the Venice Biennale two years later.
