Hartmut Austen at Good Weather

Artist: Hartmut Austen

Exhibition title: Here r more

Venue: Good Weather, North Little Rock, US

Date: May 13 – June 25, 2016

Photography: images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Good Weather

What is love without regret.

–Tom Friel (2016)

Faced to this set, paintings swung wide open, proceeding through the nave: Here r more. The view: a visually stacked image-scape, shifting frames of reference, interruptions, and a de-emphasis of the thematic footing of an exhibition, aside a rather intrepid acceptance of the mysterious, emotionally charged, and phenomenological process of painting. Slowing down. Turning around. Looking through this intermingling of pictorial space and real space, the surfaces of these stretched canvases become panes of glass: at one point reflexive, another reflective, and at another point a space through which one can see. This view, this mirror, this window, this row of kicked-out thresholds lining the aisles, is fluctuating with every flicker of light, with every brush stroke, each moment an accumulation of the last. Swiping rapidly through, flipping each page, the artist is wandering, longing, lingering, until at last a pause. Hartmut Austen belongs to the precariousness in this unhanding. This gasp. Tetelestai. And this belonging is his awareness of doubt.

Hartmut Austen studied painting and drawing with H.J. Diehl at Hochschule der Künste (University of the Arts) in Berlin. His first arrival in the United States was marked by the 1998 group exhibition VOID at Unfinished gallery in Williamsburg, New York. He has since exhibited widely in the United States and Germany, most recently at Waiting Room (Minneapolis), The Bedfellow’s Club (Chicago), and The Butcher’s Daughter (Detroit). As a member of the Telegraph Art Collective, he has worked and exhibited with artists of diverse disciplinary backgrounds. In 2009, Austen was awarded a prestigious Kresge Arts in Detroit Fellowship and was the Grant Wood Fellow for Painting and Drawing at the University of Iowa in 2012/13. He currently divides his time between Minneapolis, where he is teaching at the University of Minnesota, and Detroit. He will start teaching at Boston College this fall. Visit www.hartmutausten.com for more information about the artist and his work.

This exhibition is supported in part by a University of Minnesota Imagine Fund Faculty Grant.