France – Antibes
Located on the heights of Antibes, in the magnificent villa-workshop of one of the most legendary artist couples of the 20th century, the Hartung-Bergman Foundation presents an exhibition dedicated to the cosmic visions of Hans Hartung (1904-1989) and Anna-Eva Bergman (1909-1987) exploring their fascination for science.
” … forces that pull away from gravity, scales that are disturbed, worlds that are born and die…”1, evoking the effects of weightlessness, the gravity of stars, quasars, and other black holes, some of their paintings would have, according to astrophysicist Etienne Klein (associated with the exhibition) anticipated some of the very recent astrophysical observations.
Collection : Fondation Hartung-Bergman
Golden Nothingness
In 1963, after painting The Abyss, Anna produced two monumental monochromes in vinyl and metal leaf with eloquent titles: Golden Nothingness and Silver Nothingness, while between 1969 and 1970, on the occasion of the Apollo 11 mission, she produced, still in silver leaf, extraordinary lunar visions. “In search of universal harmony,” believing in “a higher plane, a kind of spiritual and astral plane, beyond the tangible universe,” she will never cease to access this cosmic unconsciousness through research on colors, the golden ratio, and the right proportions, at the limits of alchemy. Painting “with the old medieval technique of golden backgrounds, petrified stars […] sailing in skies forever frozen,”3 she is also a painter of movement “because her paintings are spaces where forces of attraction and repulsion play out at a distance, as in a magnetic field. “1
Collection : Fondation Hartung-Bergman.
Collection : Fondation Hartung-Bergman.
Hypnotic and psychedelic
Having dreamed of being an astronomer and, very early on, fascinated by the infinitely small and the observation of the stars, Hartung, for his part, found in abstraction the means to depict the physical energies that traverse space. Adopting the technique of spraying in the 1960s, he took painting into another dimension: evoking black holes, interstellar travel, stellar collisions, and even the “passage of an electron through a magnetic field,”1 his vinyl and acrylic paintings are a maelstrom of sprays, nebulous trails, and multicolored flows, making lemon yellows and turquoise blues rush into bottomless blacks that suck in the eye. A true space Odyssey in the style of Stanley Kubrick, propelling us into an elsewhere, “Beyond the infinite.”4
1. Quotes from the exhibition catalog.
2. Title of a work created in 1951.
3. Article published in 1956 in the magazine Le Musée vivant cited in the catalog.
4. Hans Hartung’s post-1960 paintings have often been compared to the “Beyond the Infinite” sequence in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, released in 1968.
COSMIC TRIP – Hartung and Bergman between dreams and science
Until September 30
Hartung-Bergman Foundation
173, chemin du Valbosquet, 06600 Antibes
ANNA-EVA BERGMAN
Journey to the interior
MAM of Paris
Until July 16, 2023
STEPHANIE DULOUT