Hans Hofmann

On the occasion of Art Basel Paris, Galerie Dina Vierny is pleased to devote an exhibition to Hans Hofmann (1880–1966), a major figure of postwar American art whose work remains largely unfamiliar to French audiences. In collaboration with the American contemporary art gallery, the Estate's European representative, the exhibition brings together seventeen paintings and highlights the singular, pioneering career of this German artist who, after living at the heart of the European avant-gardes in Paris, settled in the United States and became one of the key figures in the renewal of American painting.

Although he began as a figurative painter, Hofmann turned entirely to abstraction in the late 1930s. His work explores the tension between structure and spontaneity, from the dense surfaces of the 1940s to the radiant, pared-down "slab" compositions of the 1950s and 1960s. Teaching in New York and later in Provincetown (Massachusetts), he simultaneously developed a pictorial thinking grounded in color, rhythm, and the tension between depth and surface—one that would exert considerable influence on several generations of artists, from Lee Krasner to Helen Frankenthaler and Frank Stella, and would contribute to the emergence of Abstract Expressionism and later developments in American abstraction.

A retrospective organized in 1963 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, toured the United States and Europe, securing Hofmann international recognition.