We are, as humans, constantly faced with the choice of letting everything melt together or to systematically deconstruct what we perceive. Hertha Hanson’s work allows us to dwell in both states. You can see a dividing line, in other words the painting itself as part of a structure; a linguistic canon. But within this dividing line, on the canvas, a tactile line of approach rages towards chaos – the chaos that lurks behind rational explanatory models of reason, the chaos that surrounds us.
To abandon one method in order to be drawn to another – every brushstroke changes the outcome of the previous one. By covering over the previous one, the present one emerges. It occurs over and over and over and over again. Hertha Hanson's work revolves around this premise. Her work begins when the first planks have been assembled into the frame that the canvas is stretched over. They are part of a process where this covering is a prerequisite for progress.
In the suite shown at Galleri Lilith Waltenberg, Hertha Hanson uses Peter Leibling’s famous photograph of Conrad Schumann.
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Schumann was an East German soldier whose job was to guard the border between East and West Germany. One day he jumped over from East to West. Peter Leibing’s photograph captures him in the moment of jumping, in mid flight. Hertha Hanson’s paintings work around the whole sequence of events, how the photograph is taken and how the picture has been envisaged. The photograph is the charged object of his hope, the photographer’s eye, the camera recording the moment and the journey in time between the photographed moment and now – when we look at the photograph.
Hertha Hanson’s paintings offer the viewer the opportunity to stand in front of the canvas and allow it to be a universe, or to see its demarcation and read it as a painting in a canon. Her paintings struggle against the surface that is their prerequisite. She uses painting as a weapon. The paintings take no account of what they look like. They are what they are; a resonance of the very stuff we are made of. |
Hanna Sjöstrand |
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