Friedemann Hahn: Film Noir. Painting. Passion.

About

Friedemann Hahn was born in Singen, southern Germany, in 1949. He is an internationally acclaimed artist, and has, in the first twenty years of his career, had some eighty solo exhibitions around the world. He is currently professor of painting at the University of Mainz. Hahn's earliest paintings took their subject matter from the world of film. In 1981 he began a series of work inspired by 'Lust for Life', the film about van Gogh which starred Kirk Douglas. Hahn exaggerates the Expressionistic paintwork so that, at first glance, it almost obscures the subject. As Werner Meyer has commented, both motif and execution 'intermingle to [form] a dense structure'. Thus the viewer's perceptive process is reversed, and no longer moves 'from the motif to the artistic composition but from the colour structure to the motif'. More recently Hahn has incorporated Japanese figures and still life, nautical imagery and even Christian iconography (inspired by Grunevald's Isenheim altarpiece) into his work.