OPENING ON 27 MARCH FROM 12 - 6 PM
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Thomas Hartmann's view of the world is an attempt to order the chaos of his perceptions, to give them a structure in order to make them vivid. "Like a funnel, everything goes into me and comes out as a concentrate. The content is always the finding of a form, a structure," says Hartmann. In the process, he arranges the teeming masses into manageable quantities: Crowds of people at long work tables ("Langer Tisch", 2019/20), clusters of houses, books, containers, cars. Just as the mathematical doctrine of sets and their links describes the world as a summary of different objects, Hartmann's painted sets are an attempt to understand and illustrate the world. Hartmann produces a kind of painted set theory that helps him and the viewer to look at the world in a distanced and illusionless way, but also to bear it with irony and composure as it is, without wanting to improve it. In this respect, it is obvious that tidying up, eliminating and restructuring are components of Thomas Hartmann's work. In his view, not every painting needs to be preserved. A rectangle, always 22 x 16 cm in size, was cut out of each of 30 paintings from the last 20 years. In juxtaposition and as pictorial objects, the small paintings take on a new power and radiance. Strangely enough, the large pictures with the empty spaces do not lose their power through destruction; rather, a revival often takes place. Hartmann has stretched the cut-out originals on stretcher frames.
 
In our Showroom, in addition to a new "Hartmann Picture Hanging Scheme", we also display a selection of the destroyed pictures. The mounted cut-outs can each be purchased together with a double catalogue in a wooden slipcase. The authors of the catalogue texts are Alexander Kluge, Eckhart J. Gillen and Johannes Listewnik.