Galerie Schanewald

Bernard BUFFET is a French expressionist painter born in Paris in 1928 and died in 1999.

A precocious child, he was accepted at the age of 15 at the National School of Fine Arts. Introduced to collectors by the painter Aujame, he received the Critics' Prize at the age of 20. Bernard BUFFET is a master of misery that has its place in the greatest museums. In Japan, a museum has even been entirely dedicated to him in Higashino with nearly 2000 works presented.

The personality of Bernard BUFFET will reveal itself in 1947 with its first angular characters which will classify it in the expressionist movement miserabilist of Francis Gruber and Georges Rouault. The first contact with Emmanuel David took place in 1948, which was really at the origin of his international career with a first exhibition at the Galerie DROUANT-DAVID in 1949.
 
His works are strong, poignant, and the determined drawing lengthens like a plea. The style of Bernard BUFFET is identifiable among all by the networks of straight and dry lines of which he had made his pictorial system. Gray faces, wrinkled foreheads, straight or sparse hair, clenched hands: his characters seem crucified. The style Bernard BUFFET is required.

Somsak Hanumas Born in 1980 in Bangkok, where he lived his entire childhood and most of his adult life. Initially destined for a career as an engineer, he joined the Royal Institute of Technology in Ladkrabang, but never forgot his first passion, painting. As a young graduate, Somsak decided to take up his brushes and give free rein to his vocation and would never part with his art again. He has now been painting for over 18 years using a technique he taught himself.
 
After having painted a background on the canvas, Somsak adds many colored dots to it, with which he sprinkles the canvas following a gradient whose general idea is engraved in his mind. After this step, Somsak, using a finer brush, draws a series of superimposed lines on the dots, until they cover the entire canvas. This work, whose length and repetitiveness require extreme patience, suits him because it gives him time to reflect on the meaning of his painting and, further still, on the meaning of life and the passage of time.
 
A canvas requires on average 8 to 12 weeks before being completed. Somsak often says that the source of his art comes from the landscapes that marked him. A beach in Thailand, a field battered by the monsoon, the edge of a jungle… while adding a personal touch, his own look.
 
The works of Somsak Hanumas have already conquered the Whalroos Foundation in Finland, the Mikati Collection in Lebanon, the Bernard Magrez Collection in Bordeaux, the Vermeer Collection in the Netherlands and not forgetting the LVMH group by taking their place on the walls of their boutiques.
 
Exhibition

Venice 2022 Art Biennale European Cultural Center

Hans Hartung was born in 1904 and died in 1989. He was a German painter who became a naturalized French citizen and one of the fathers of abstraction and tachism.

Between the ages of eight and ten, while living in Basel with his parents, Hans Hartung showed curiosity about astronomy and photography, but already he had shown a penchant for the drawing which would become more pronounced during his classical studies at the Dresden high school. In his notebooks, in 1922 he traced his first abstract designs, thus elaborating the fundamental elements of his graphic language, to which he immediately finds a pictorial equivalence with his "tachist" watercolors of the same year and which he confirms in his large square drawings in black chalk or red chalk of 1923.

Spontaneously—because he was unaware of the existence of the first “abstracts”—the young autodidact had established the bases of his particular dynamic expression. Hartung took courses in philosophy and art history at the University of Leipzig, attended the academies of fine arts in Dresden and Leipzig, where he acquired technical knowledge which he would later deepen in Munich with the Professor Max Doerner. He had had at the Dresden museum the revelation of the old masters: Holbein, Cranach, Greco, Hals, Rembrandt, of which he had already made copies of drawings or engravings, as he had painted one of his first small canvases in 1921 of after a reproduction of Goya's Fusillades.

Hans Hartung was also interested in the Expressionists (Nolde and especially Kokoschka) and discovered modern French painting at the International Art Exhibition in Dresden in 1926. In 1925, he attended a lecture by Kandinsky, whose doctrinaire remarks on the aesthetics of the Bauhaus did not appeal to him, because he refused to study at this school, preferring to travel across Europe, stay on the Mediterranean coast and in Paris, where he spent the winters from 1927 to 1929. He had his first exhibition in Dresden in 1931 and then settled from 1932 to 1934 in the Balearic Islands, in Minorca, where he painted his first paintings called "ink spots", which developed his drawings from 1922 to 1925 and which he continued in Paris until 1938. After a stay in Stockholm, he went to Berlin in 1935, but, to escape the Hitler regime, he left Germany almost immediately and came to settle in Paris.
 
At the time of the war, he enlisted in the Foreign Legion; seriously injured, his right leg had to be amputated. The following year, he obtained French nationality. Back in Paris in the summer of 1945, he began to paint again and from 1946 took part in the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles and the Salon de Mai, where he subsequently exhibited regularly. In 1947, he made his first personal exhibition in Paris (gal. Lydia Conti). Very quickly, as the stages of intensive creation follow one another, general interest in the work of Hartung develops, who is recognized in a few years as one of the masters of contemporary art, both by his fundamental originality only by the influence that his new conception of abstract art soon exerted.

In contrast to the dogmatic spirit of Geometric Abstraction that had imposed itself on the younger post-war generation, Hans Hartung's art was characterized from the outset by the freedom of his subjective dynamism, which was expressed in the graphic traces of spontaneous energetic acts. "What I like," he declared, "is to act on the canvas," thus putting forward the idea of "painting as action," which was to be generalized in New York with Action Painting. The importance of graphic expression in Hartung is partly at the origin of a valorization of black as a major color, which imposed itself for a fairly long period on a whole sector of painting, both figurative and abstract (T. 1949-26, 1949, Stockholm, Moderna Museet).

He himself had nevertheless been led to materialize the field of action of his writing, by coloring certain elements, scrapings in fresh paint (1961) or by shading the backgrounds of his paintings, which, from 1963, appear as vast spaces of vibrant depth, scratched or not by spidery networks (T. 1967/H25, Paris, MNAM). More recent canvases give a greater role to color contrasts and are sometimes animated by vigorous streaks or rhythmic arabesques for which he makes use of a wide range of instruments to paint, sometimes even including tree branches or of broom, sometimes occupied by vast dynamic spots sprayed with airbrush and devoid of any graphics.

At the same time as he produced his painted work, Hartung did not stop practicing drawing, executing innumerable pencils and pastels, and, at several times (1928, 1938), he also devoted himself to engraving. , showing himself to be a master of all copper techniques, but especially in lithography (from 1946), whose flexibility he appreciated. He also practiced photography a lot and gathered considerable material, sometimes used in the development of his paintings. The first exhibition of his photographs took place in 1977 at the Center Noroit, Arras.

In 1980, an exhibition at the MAM of the City of Paris was devoted to his work from 1922 to 1939. Hartung is represented in most French and international museums.

Georges Mathieu is a famous French painter born in 1921 in Boulogne-sur-Mer in Pas-de-Calais and died in 2012 in Boulogne-Billancourt. He is known for being the initiator of the movement known as Lyrical Abstraction. He studied law, literature and philosophy at the University of Lille, then began painting in 1942. Georges Mathieu very quickly opposed geometric abstraction which gave a central place to the form and structure of a canvas, and supported the American gestural painting which was much more liberated at the time. He became the promoter of Lyrical Abstraction, a movement devoid of any constraints and freed from classical artistic codes. He was inspired by American Action Painting, whose principles and philosophy he admired. In 1947, during his first exhibition at the Salon des Réalités nouvelles, he declared "Freedom is emptiness". From 1950, a component of Lyrical Abstraction was conceptualized: tachism, which refers to the paintings of Georges Mathieu, emblems of informal art, in the middle of which sit stains generated by projections, splashes or even drips. The goal is to give as much freedom as possible to the material, by influencing their movement in a minimal way. It is a question of depositing them without a precise objective, furtively, in an unthinking manner, and then letting them evolve as they wish, detaching themselves from any artistic conformity. Georges Mathieu does not use any tools, definitively freeing himself from technique. He paints directly using tubes of paint. The artist also multiplies his creations in public. Malraux calls him the "Western calligrapher". In 1985, the artist went further by making a final turning point in his painting: he freed himself from the central form, the last vestige of the classical rules of art. From then on, the entire canvas was taken over by forms. Deeply convinced that the artist should not remain in his ivory tower, Georges Mathieu was also active in the public domain. In 1947, he became Director of Public Relations for the American company United States Lines in Paris.
 
From 1953, he was its editor-in-chief for a period of 10 years. A great traveler, he stayed in the United States, Japan, Brazil, Argentina, Lebanon, Israel, Canada and almost all the countries of Europe. These trips made him become more aware of his civic responsibilities. He realized that the challenge of his time was to reconcile man with his environment. More than ever, the artist had a place in this world that was losing its meaning and a major role to play. Georges Mathieu then began a series of manual works, involving furniture, jewelry, tapestries, fountains, posters, medals, stamps and even went so far as to create the new 10 franc coin. Following this same logic, he created several monumental sculptures, notably for the Neuilly Sports Complex, for the Elf-Aquitaine Tower in La Défense, for the CES in Charenton, for the Town Halls of Orléans, Boulogne-Billancourt, Brive, etc. Georges Mathieu is a committed artist, firmly convinced of the essential role of education in society. He fights for an education that would prioritize sensitivity over reason and human progress over economic progress. In 1976, he became Administrator of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts and Crafts and Member of the Commission for the Reform of Art Education. Georges Mathieu has held over 120 individual exhibitions throughout his career, notably in New York, Montreal, Rio de Janeiro, Bahrain, Tunis, Singapore, Paris, Tokyo and in all the major world cities. His work can be admired in over 79 museums and public collections.

Bernar Venet is a French visual artist born on April 20, 1941 in Château-Arnoux-Saint-Auban in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence.
He resides in the United States where he became known for his steel sculptures and drawings.
In 1983, he set up the basic structure of his Indeterminate lines. He makes them in Corten steel and installs them in many urban spaces and for public collections, notably in Nice, Paris, Berlin, Tokyo, Strasbourg, Beijing, Austin, San Francisco and at the Grenoble museum. Director Seth Schneidman dedicates a film to him Bernar Venet 1983.
In 2009 he created the Venet Foundation in the United States. The Espace de l'art concret in Mouans-Sartoux is mounting the first public exhibition of the Venet collection. In June, he was invited to install four large sculptures over more than 1 m200 at the Arsenale Novissimp on the occasion of the 2rd Venice Biennale. He develops his variations on the shaped canvas with golden backgrounds.
 
In 2012 was inaugurated 88.5° Bow x 8, a 27 meter high sculpture at Gibbs Farm, near Auckland in New Zealand. He reveals his GRIBS in Helsinki, Auckland and Singapore3. In 2012, The Petit Larousse devotes a notice to him in its 2013 edition.
An exhibition is organized in Marseille at the Palais du Pharo as part of Marseille-Provence 2013.
In 2014, at the invitation of Jacques Villeglé, the artist exhibited at the Espace Jacques Villeglé a set of works around the Hypothesis of the Point.