Simon Hantaï at the Ludwig Museum, Budapest

Ludwig Museum - Museum of Contemporary Art, Budapest

SIMON HANTAI When: May 8 - August 31, 2014 Simon Hantaï was born in 1922 in Biatorbágy, nearby Budapest, Hungary; studied at the Hungarian College of Fine Arts (today Hungarian University of Fine Arts) under Vilmos Aba Novák and Béla Kontuly. As a student of exceptional talent, he was granted a scholarship by the Hungarian Academy in Rome. Following his sojourn in Italy, the young artist Hantai emigrated to France in 1948, together with his wife, Zsuzsanna, also a painter.  After a short period of Surrealism, Hantai was influenced by Abstract Expressionism, then, from the 1960’s onwards, he worked out a unique image-making technique (the so-called pliage). He created a very special abstract pattern on the canvas surface by folding and painting it. He was inspired by the results of Pollock’s free and independent painting technique as well as research done by French painters on problems of light, colour and surface. In the beginning of the 1980’s he gave up painting, and voluntarily withdrew into “exile”.  In 2013, more than three decades after Hantaï’s first retrospective exhibition, the Centre Pompidou organised a monumental show on Hantaï’s life and work. Continuing the line, this comprehensive exhibition in Budapest will be the first in Hungary to present works by the world famous artist to the wider public with the intention to represent every period and all main aspects of Hantai’s oeuvre. The exhibition will be realised in cooperation with Hantai’s heirs and will include several artworks that have never been on public display before. (Click on the image for details)

Simon Hantaï at Villa Medici, Roma

Villa Medici, Roma

SIMON HANTAI When: February 12 - May 11 2014 From 12 February to 11 May 2014 (opening 11 February 6.30 p.m.-8.30 p.m.) Villa Medici is presenting the first important Italian retrospective dedicated to Simon Hantaï, curated by Éric de Chassey. This exhibition has been devised and realized six years after the artist's death in cooperation with the Centre Pompidou, following the exhibition presented there from 22 May to 2 September 2013, which was curated by Dominique Fourcade, Isabelle Monod Fontaine and Alfred Pacquement, former Director of the Musée National d'Art Moderne - Centre de Création Industrielle. Forty various sized paintings realized between 1958 and 2004 will be displayed in the Grandes Galeries of Villa Medici. The exhibition is divided into two sections linked by a selection of small paintings that helps understanding the artist's itinerary in the 1960s and 1970s. (Click on the image for details)

Simon Hantai in a group show at Gagosian, Paris

Gagosian Gallery, Paris

PLIAGE / FOLD When: February 28 - April 19, 2014  When I am folding, I am objective and that allows me to lose myself. -Simon Hantaï "PLIAGE / FOLD" brings together artists from different generations who have explored the act of folding as both concept and formal process. Folding as action, illusion, and symbol has appeared throughout contemporary art and literature, from Simon Hantaï's literal process of folding the canvas, dousing it in oil paint, then unfolding it to reveal inadvertent yet lyrical patterns; to Gilles Deleuze's influential meditation The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (1988), in which the world is interpreted as an infinity of surfaces twisting through time and space; to Tatiana Trouvé's recent Refoldingssculptures cast from discarded and refolded packing materials.  (Click on the image for details)

Simon Hantaï in a group show at Mnuchin Gallery, NY

Mnuchin Gallery, New York

BLACK | WHITE When: February 6- March 22, 2014 Mnuchin Gallery is pleased to announce Black | White, an exhibition of paintings, drawings and sculptures united by their monochromatic palette and spanning six decades of postwar art. In the exhibition, Andy Warhol's Flowers are echoed in the graphic florals of a Christopher Wool painting; a monumental Concentric Square painting by Frank Stella faces off with a large Donald Judd stack; and the cracked-earth surface in Alberto Burri's Cretto finds its literal counterpoint in the crumbled asphalt bed of a David Hammons Basketball Drawing. Also featured in the exhibition are works by Alexander Calder, Philip Guston, Simon Hantaï, Conrad Marca-Relli, Robert Ryman, Cy Twombly, and Günther Uecker. (Click on the image for details)