Hans Hartung
The physical gesture and the body norm
Lecture with Dominik Eckel

The paintings of the early and mid-1950s by Hans Hartung, for which he was awarded the Rubens Prize of the city of Siegen in 1957, appear as if they were painted from large sweeps. Research on Hartung in recent decades has repeatedly pointed out that these large sweeps of deep black paint are, however, merely a feint used by the artist: the painter is staging a physical gesture, leading viewers to believe that meaningful and physical actions have inscribed themselves in his paintings. In the postwar period, Hartung was faced with the challenges of a non-normative body, having lost a leg in World War II. The physical gesture of his painting and the reality of his body are initially antithetical to each other in his 1950s oeuvre. Between these two tense poles, the lecture will trace how Hans Hartung's painting reveals a corporeality that, on the one hand, can be reconstructed through a fictitious, bodily gesture and, on the other hand, works off a bodily norm of gestural painting of the 1950s.

Dominik Eckel studied art history, Romance languages and literature, and German studies in Frankfurt am Main and Montpellier, graduating in 2017 with a thesis on the photography of Hans Hartung. After his studies, he worked as a research assistant at DFK Paris. Subsequently, he received the Sonja&Reinhard Ernst Stiftung scholarship for his PhD project from June 2019, awarded by the Research Center Informal Art at the University of Bonn. His PhD project investigates the corporeal and choreographic aspects of postwar gestural-abstract painting and the interrelationships of networks of gestural abstraction in New York, Ōsaka, Paris, Frankfurt am Main, and the Rhine-Ruhr area.

The event is part of a series in cooperation with the Art History Department at the University of Siegen and the Art History Institute at the University of Cologne.