Hannah van Bart | Inner Homeland

509 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011

For inquiries, please contact Senior Director Kelly Woods:

kelly@boeskygallery.com

“You look not only with your eyes, but with the senses; with all that is inside of you, equipped with all of your experiences. How cold it is, how much moisture is in the air, how the light falls. What does a dog’s bark sound like? The painting is influenced by the atmosphere. I’ve always felt that a painting can become more real if it involves all the senses."

"In the last part of Mahler's symphony, Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth), I find it stirring to hear the words: 'Der Bach singt voller Wohllaut durch das Dunkel,’ (the brook sings melodiously through the darkness). It makes something that is invisible, unseen, so very present. Visible for the mind's eye only, it clearly influences how you perceive that moment: the realm of invisibility has entered the image. This moving in is what makes an image real for me. I call it 'the arrival of form'. And hitting it, or trying to hit, makes painting worthwhile for me."

– Hannah van Bart

Marianne Boesky Gallery is pleased to present Inner Homeland, an exhibition of new work by Dutch painter Hannah van Bart (b. 1963; Oud-Zuilen, Maarssen, the Netherlands). For her seventh solo exhibition with Marianne Boesky Gallery, van Bart captures fleeting sensorial memories in vivid, evocative landscapes. 

Throughout van Bart’s intimate, atmospheric paintings, haunting landscapes and imagined figures materialize out of dense, painterly fogs. Drawing inspiration from a host of disparate sources—from the warm golden light of the Dutch Old Masters to the gestural freedom of Abstract Expressionism—van Bart articulates the physical and emotional contours of her forms with remarkable psychological depth, evoking at once a sense of longing and unease, of inescapable familiarity and acute uncertainty. 

With Inner Homeland van Bart turns her focus to the landscape, imbuing her settings with a potent sense of freedom. Recently, van Bart has returned to a group of pencil drawings she made in the early 1980s as a young artist living in Oud-Zuilen—the Dutch village near Utrecht where she grew up. In these intimate drawings, van Bart captured dense, wooded landscapes and sparse meadows. Filtered through leafy canopies, dappled sunlight shines on forest floors marked by subtle fencing and evocative houses emerging from the trees. Made more than 40 years ago, the drawings are unmistakably van Bart’s—the careful repetition of the line, the emotive quality of light, and the unmistakable sensation of feelings remembered all so characteristic of the artist’s hand. 

For the new works in Inner Homeland, van Bart borrows from these drawings—as well as more recent drawings—reimagining anthropomorphic houses, fragments of forests, and lengths of fencing into delicate, ethereal paintings. These paintings are products of time: van Bart works in layers, building up the surfaces over time, erasing and reworking as she goes. Each painting contains a fleeting moment that has been turned over and over again in one’s mind as areas of loosely smudged paint creating a tangible sense of memories just out of reach. 

Alongside new landscape paintings, Inner Homeland also features van Bart’s newest portraits and still lifes. In these portraits, recurring characters from across the artist’s oeuvre appear anew, sipping cups of tea or resting their cheeks on gently closed fists. In the still lifes, van Bart renders patterned tea sets—pots, cups and saucers, spoons—in loose, painterly strokes. For van Bart, the subject of these works matters far less than the feelings expressed within them; the marks that make up the corner of an eye, the buttons on a blouse, the curve of a handle, the lace of a boot all visual manifestations of interiority articulated on canvas. In the context of Inner Homeland, these portraits and still lifes come to be read as landscapes themselves—a figure’s shoulders transforming into a horizon line or a spoon containing within its bowl an entire universe. 

With the work in Inner Homeland, van Bart embarks on an exploration of memory—turning recollections over and over again in her mind before reconstructing them on canvas, layer by layer—exploring subtle changes in the light, the way a shadow or a brushstroke conjures a reflection completely unprompted. While van Bart’s work is steeped in notions of memory, there is no nostalgia here—there is no desire to go back, no longing for some bygone time. What van Bart captures, instead, is memory as a sensorial experience—offering a window to places no longer there, to moments that live only within one’s mind. With Inner Homeland, van Bart makes present that which is ordinarily invisible or unseen—embracing the brook on its melodious journey through the darkness.

ABOUT HANNAH VAN BART

Van Bart’s work was the subject of a 2023 solo exhibition at the Landhuis Oud Amelisweerd, Centraal Museum, Utrecht, the Netherlands. Her paintings and drawings have also been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Kunstmuseum Den Haag, The Hague, the Netherlands; the Cobra Museum of Modern Art, Amstelveen, the Netherlands, and Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York, NY; and Vielmetter, Los Angeles, CA. van Bart’s work has been featured in exhibitions at the Chazen Museum of Art, Madison, WI; the Rubell Family Collection, Miami, FL; the Singer Laren, the Netherlands; the Kunstmuseum Den Haag, the Hague, the Netherlands; the Cobra Museum of Modern Art, Amstelveen, the Netherlands; and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Centraal Museum, Utrecht, the Netherlands; the Chazen Museum of Art, Madison, WI; Kunstmuseum Den Haag, The Hague, the Netherlands; Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH; Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence, RI; and the Teylers Museum, Haarlem, the Netherlands.