Marianne Boesky Gallery is pleased to announce the second New York solo exhibition of Dutch artist Hannah van Bart. Van Bart’s paintings and drawings depicting solitary figures set against isolated backdrops broach a different form of portraiture. The cropped heads, floating mouths, oversized hands and part animal/part human hybrids of van Bart’s canvases exude an inner existence of those illustrated. The artist works from memory rather than from photographs, attempting to create and structure figures that she can walk away from, leaving them to survive on their own. Though these beings achieve their independence, they remain in a state of decay, anxiety, isolation and hope.
This new body of work marks a step away from the mechanical prototype-inspired figures of van Bart’s earlier paintings and drawings, though the artist continues to pursue male, female and animal forms with her distinctive outlines and matte palettes. Focused in large part on her catalogue of imagined faces and bodies, many of van Bart’s seated portraits feel like idiosyncratic headshots. Murky backgrounds consisting of dissolving grids, brick walls and abstract patterns are repeated and stamped on the figures’ asymmetrical faces and bodies. Erasure marks in the drawings are as telling as the lines chosen to remain. Speaking to the resolve of her depicted figures, van Bart explains their “sparkle of a possibly intact inner life, no matter what the circumstances.”
Hannah van Bart was born in 1963 in the Netherlands, and lives and works in Amsterdam. She has held solo exhibitions at the Gemeentemuseum, The Hague and at the CoBrA Museum, Amsterdam.
