Hans Burkhardt

A major exhibition, “Hans Burkhardt – Expressionism in the 1960’s – Paintings and Drawings” will be featured at Paul Mahder Gallery.
This will be the first exhibit of Burkhardt’s paintings in San Francisco of this scale and scope since a landmark 30-year retrospective at the Legion of Honor in 1961-62.

The exhibition includes paintings and drawings spanning the entire decade of the 1960s, a critical period in the evolution of American art. Works in the exhibition reveal the full range of Burkhardt’s paintings, reflecting both the excitement of a decade marked by the hopeful social revolution that was the 1960s, and works of unprecedented potency in their protest of the Viet Nam War.

Hans Burkhardt’s abstract expressionist works were well known to the artists of the ‘60s. He served as an example of constancy and artistic independence, as he was perhaps the most widely exhibited west coast artist of that period and decade that led up to it. In the 1950s, for example, Burkhardt was the subject of no less than 23 solo exhibitions and his works were also included in more than 30 museum exhibitions including a 10-Year Retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum (now Norton Simon Museum). In the 1960s he continued to exhibit in astoundingly large numbers of major exhibitions including a 30-year Retrospective organized by the Santa Barbara Museum that traveled to San Francisco’s Palace of the Legion of Honor and the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, a 40-Year Retrospective at the San Diego Art Association, and an important exhibition at the San Diego Museum of Art of his provocative paintings responding to the Viet Nam War.

Burkhardt carries Modernism into new territory – renews faith in it as a conquistador exploring and articulating psychic terra incognita. Like Gorky, but in his own inimitable way, Burkhardt recognized the profound psychological character of Modernism: the power of its means of fragmentation, gestural indeterminacy, and uncanny composition to reveal intuitively hitherto unacknowledged psychic depths”.
Donald Kuspit – art historian and critic

“Hans Burkhardt – Expressionism in the 1960s” includes early works of that decade which extended his uniquely poignant abstract expressionist paintings of the 1950s. He was one of the few painters of that period who steadfastly flaunted, and indeed thrived despite the political censorship and hostility toward modern abstract painting that informed much of the 1950s, reaching levels of hysteria in the McCarthy era.

Burkhardt extended abstract expressionism into astounding and revolutionary realms, reaching apotheosis in paintings that scholars have cited as masterpieces of 20th century painting.

Hans Burkhardt was born in Basel, Switzerland, in 1904. He immigrated to New York in 1924, where he shared Arshile Gorky’s studio for the better part of the years 1927-37. When he moved to Los Angeles in 1937, Burkhardt represented the most significant bridge between New York and Los Angeles, in that his paintings of the 1930s are part of the genesis of American Abstract Expressionism. In 1992, two years before his death, the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters honored Burkhardt for his lifetime achievement. His works are included in major museums internationally.

Paul Mahder Gallery
3378 Sacramento Street
San Francisco (CA) 94118 United States
Tel. +1 (415) 4747707
info@paulmahdergallery.com
www.paulmahdergallery.com

Opening hours
Monday - Saturday from 10am to 6pm
Sunday from 1pm to 5pm

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