BIOGRAPHY

1971
Born in Freiburg / Breisgau, Germany

1990-91
Studies Photographie at Johannes-Gutenberg-Schule, Stuttgart

1991-93
Studies History Art at Eberhardt-Karl-University, Tübingen

1995-98
Studies Graphic at Johannes-Gutenberg-Schule, Stuttgart
Lives in Reutlingen, Germany

2005
Award of "Verband Bildender Künstler Württemberg"

EXHIBITIONS [(S) Solo]

2002
Life, Städtische Galerie Contact, Böblingen (S)
Malerei, Städtische Galerie Am Laien, Ditzingen (S)
Hinterland, Galerie Clasing, Münster (S)

2003
Preis der Darmstädter Sezession
Institut Mathildenhöhe, Darmstadt (Catalog)
Pablo's Birthday, New York

2004
Pablo's Birthday, New York
Scope New York, Pablo's Birthday, New York
Bocca Della Verita, International Groupshow
Kunstverein Bad Salzdetfurth (Catalog)
Active Duty, Studio 84, New York

2005
Lichtwinter, Pablo's Birthday, New York (Catalog, S)
Basislager, Städtische Galerie Ostfildern (Catalog, S)
Weisser Wald, Galerie Kunst im Heppächer, Esslingen (S)
Scope Miami, Pablo's Birthday, New York
Stadthaus Ulm, Mannheimer Kunstverein (Catalog)

2006
Fremde Spuren, Galerie Burkhard Eikelmann, Düsseldorf (Catalog, S)
Art Moscow, Galerie Burkhard Eikelmann, Düsseldorf (Catalog)
Lend me Your Ear, International Groupshow
Kunstverein Bad Salzdetfurth (Catalog)
Malerei Jetzt! / Part 1, Städtische Galerie Friedrichsbau, Bühl (Catalog)
Scope Miami, Pablo's Birthday, New York

2007
Night Shift, Pablo's Birthday, New York (Catalog, S)
Galerie Rothamel, Erfurt (S)
Malerei Jetzt! / Part 3, Städtische Galerie Friedrichsbau, Bühl (Catalog)
Art Cologne, Galerie Burkhard Eikelmann, Düsseldorf (Catalog, S)
Zu Haus - Installation im Offentlichen Raum, Stadt Eppingen (Catalog)
Einblicke, Stadtgalerie Klagenfurt, Austria (S, with Katrin Bremermann) (Catalog)
Art Cologne Palma de Mallorca, Galerie Rothamel, Frankfurt / Erfurt
Scope Miami, Pablo's Birthday, New York

2008
Autre Monde, Galerie Rothamel, Frankfurt (S)
Art Cologne, Galerie Burkhard Eikelmann, Düsseldorf
Art Cologne, Galerie Rothamel, Erfurt / Frankfurt
Pablo's Birthday, New York

2009
Museumquartier Wien, Austria




THE OBJECT'S OWN LIFE OSCILLATING BETWEEN SPACE AND SURFACE

At the moment, paintings are enjoying a resurgence of popularity on the international art market. This phenomenon is due to many causes, but primarily to the quality of the pictures offered, once more bringing to light the great potentials of painting as an art form. In a visual world dominated by flat screen aesthetics and streamlined smoothness, the painted picture reaffirms the primacy of the three-dimensional space. Guided by his imagination and experience, the viewer can enter into the world which the painter has opened up to him and let his eyes and thoughts wander. This is the magic of painting, known and praised since the Renaissance. The title of a small size painting called "At Home" by Eckhart Hahn (2005) illustrates paradigmatically this power of painting. An old-fashioned toy plane is heading towards a flowered wall which occupies the whole background of the picture. The skewed perspective on the plane, its wings glimmering from the thick dabs of white paint (the century-old impasto technique to capture the light), brings about the illusion of three-dimensionality. The weave of the canvas and the flowery pattern on the pale monochromatic fabric add a decorative element to the picture. The juxtaposition of figuration and abstraction creates a tension which fuels the toy flyer as if with kerosene. In the painting, the painting itself is treated as the paradoxical place where painter and viewer are in their house, that is "at home".

Eckart Hahn's painting style has evolved, with figure and landscape participating more actively as performers in his pictures. The surreal arrangements have become more complex. This added complexity does not only concern motifs, but also the formal, technical and aesthetical dynamism. Thus, lately, the artist works on large size tusche drawings which, in black and white, remind us of etchings without being such. As picture carriers, silk raffia or papyrus give the drawings a particular tactility. The painter has always attached much importance to this haptic dimension. The picture's sensuous surface invites the viewer to enter into the labyrinth of the painting, it is not a closed surface, but an opening which attracts magically - with an uncertain outcome. The textures speak their own language which we do not understand at first glance, they are separated from the things to which they belong. Factories, people, mountains and landscapes are covered with cloth, sewn up, as if hermetically sealed. Sealed worlds. Man and nature are condensed into grotesque allegories. Here, there is a note of pungent criticism. Thus, Hahn's predilection for pupated, amorphous creatures is not self-indulgent virtuosity, but it is not an exercise in ecocriticism either. On the contrary, the surfaces emits dynamic signals in order to heighten, and mislead, the perception of the viewer. They in the first place express the painter's sensibility in his never ending quest to find the essence of figurative painting. Are objects something other than autonomous creatures living their own life? It does not matter if it is a mountain, a tool, a chair or a tablecloth. The interiors enclosed in boxes - paradoxically outside spaces at the same time, that is both private and public - evoke attempts to break free, but where? The covers awake the desire to deconstruct in the true meaning of the word: to remove and shake off layers in order to free the original stratum. But: where to find it?

The drawing "Skin Merchants" (2005) shows two men in working clothes hauling big bales of skins with bars. In a manner recalling the Leipzig painter Neo Rausch's radiant narratives whose influence on Eckart Hahn's work is perceptible, the skin could constitute a metaphor for the craft of the painter who forms the special "fabric" of the picture out of physical fabrics and imaginary arrangements. It is neither surprising nor reprehensible when the painter's gaze goes from Reutlingen to Leipzig to register what is being done there. To stand alone means to compare and to demarcate oneself in a conscious manner. In contrast to the paintings by his colleagues Neo Rausch or Matthias Weischer, addressing more the picturesque aspects of the picture, Eckart Hahn's works are characterized by a photographic accuracy. Typical of photographic perception, this accuracy does not come so much from his training as a photographer, but from his double-edged concept of the picture as questionable reality. Indeed, the crystalline structure of his figurative paintings presents a faked limpidity which we, immediately, perceive as counterfeit. We move within these pictorial spaces with heightened senses and collide into the hermetic surreal narratives.
Hahn dramatizes through modifications of scale, like magnification and miniaturisation, the juxtaposition of heterogeneous elements creates toy worlds which are not playful. Objectivity and emotion enter into a surprising symbiosis. The cold grey of the mountain crests in the "Massif" (2005) and the pale white light in "Sunday Afternoon" (2005) illustrate this point in a vivid manner.

by
Dr. Jan Nicolaisen, Museum der bildenden Künste , Leipzig 2006

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ART BETWEEN COMIC AND CATASTROPHE

The works of Eckart Hahn are pathmarks, compellingly depicted fragments pregnant with a question begging to be answered about the story behind the story. But the only sure thing is the question - or is it just a question mark? - hanging in the air, "What happened until now?". The artist throws the question right back to the viewer and does not in any way hint at an answer. He enjoys the viewer's helplessness, he conjures up an unhappy ending and brings the story to a climax of hopelessness.

However, Hahn does not have the slightest intention to tell heavy over-moralizing stories engulfed in a trance of decadence. In our specialized and globalized world, may Mister Nobody, people like you and I, muse over the sense or nonsense of any action? Hahn's candid, but also disillusioned attitude is obvious: if we get out of the ideological trenches, we find it increasingly difficult to make a distinction between "right" and "wrong", between "good" and "wrong"; black-and-white painting has, a long time ago already, thrown these categories over board, indeed it has, in the truest meaning of the word, overcome them - leaving us, it must also be said, somewhat bewildered. In an interview in May 2002, Eckart Hahn gave genetic engineering and the Middle East conflict as examples. Today, these subjects are explosive as ever. And here, it is hardly relevant since Hahn does not intend to get involved in politics or to treat such subjects in a concrete manner. What matters to him is this bewilderment, this helplessness inflicted on man by events which go beyond his horizon.

It is here that begins the fascination of Hahn's oeuvre. He depicts two men in protective overalls wading through a swampy area (Moor, 2005), one is pointing at something which we cannot see while the other must bend over to stare into the pond, perhaps aghast, perhaps simply curious. Between the shore vegetation in the middle ground and the snowcapped mountains in the background there emerges a factory, so shrouded that it would be unrecognizable, were it not for a chimney towering over it. Otherwise it could easily be mistaken for a church. Thus, the viewer is not confronted with an idyllic scene, quite the reverse. But what is a factory doing here any way? What are the men looking for in the pond? What actually happened?

Evil be to him who evil thinks. Have we been manipulated so much that, in any good news program, we expect the bad news first? In his photo-(sur)realistically encoded pictures, Hahn shows images which at first represent nothing else than what they are. A table, simply wrapped in a patterned cloth, morphs into a carpet on which two mini-chairs are lying, knocked over (Sunday Afternoon, 2005). A table is a table is a - carpet. The chairs, toys on the table, transmute into the remains of a tragedy lying on the carpet. Abandoned tents (unless the owners are sleeping blissfully), whimsical rubber work gloves (occasionally somewhat dollish in appearance), camouflaged boxes and military paraphernalia of indistinct character, these recurring motifs, indeed this whole world of outside and inside spaces, thrown totally upside down and yet somehow still familiar, turn the works into a series of fictional snapshots.
We viewers can catch ourselves as we make a joke, easily with the artist's help, out of the threatening tragedy evolving in these acryl paintings, in an attempt to protect ourselves, to avoid despair. Thus, these snapshots transmogrify into comic strips, and who would wonder if, suddenly, one of the "out-stripping" (anti-) heroes - let's say Max and Moritz, Charlie Brown or Gaston and Spirou - came around the corner, protagonist in a story of a cheerful or unnoticed failure. In the world of the motionless picture series, the laws of day-to-day life are suspended; the creator requires particular powers of observation, "he needs not only a keen sense of the peculiar quirks of human beings, but also of the objects surrounding them" (Charles M. Schulz, creator of Peanuts). In addition, a comic figure, different from a film actor, is a kind of empty form waiting to be filled by the viewer with his own person. Eckart Hahn plays like a virtuoso on the keyboard of the comic strip manipulator: he depicts men with qualities, but without personality, unless they have just disappeared from the picture or have not succeeded in doing so, lying depressed on the ground. As concluding images in a fantastic pictorial, these scenes have an unhappy ending. Either that or the eerily tragic roles have been masterly played by the comic strip figures.

by
Dr. Günter Baumann, Reclam Verlag, Stuttgart, April 2006

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LIFE AT THE SEAMS

The world is partitioned into chambers. Each one creates its own unique reality, but the viewer gets to see only an extract of it, a view which never shows everything as in the reality we know. Thus, we see a grass landscape with a factory-like building going up in flames. However, fire is painted/imprinted only on the outer skin of the building made of canvas. It is impossible to decide whether it is it only a scaffold concealed by the canvas, or a real building quasi wrapped. In the foreground, a depression to which stairs descend. There, lying in high grass, an organ-like object linked to other similar objects which are assembled around the depression. The worlds drift past the viewer, segmented, in themselves, but there still exists a connection between them. Certain things keep cropping up. Tubes, containers holding liquids, symbols out of the world we know, tanks, houses. But these things are always estranged, slightly cut off from the familiar, they seem peculiarly hollow, stage-like and perhaps more like toys.

For example, there is a tank out of strips stitched together, or a landscape as a patchwork blanket, or figures posing like ready-made dummy prototypes - Eckart Hahn's paintings are inhabited by objects and figures taken from real life, but they exist in a parallel universe which might not be very remote from ours. This painting is schooled in realism, but what does that mean in fact? What kind of reality does it construct and what effect does it have in the viewer's head? Let us try the other way around. The pictures portray a world where the familiar and unfamiliar collide and blend together. The details are painted in such a picturesque manner as to suggest real-world plausibility at the highest degree possible. Things like these, we could have seen them before, with experienced eyes, after all, we are intimately acquainted with the materiality of the world. Materiality: cloth, leather, plastic, occasionally grass, concrete. All this is somehow wrapped, professionally packaged and sewn together. And we begin already to doubt: these objects, these landscapes, how big are they in fact? Are we looking at nature in proportion 1:1 or at models, model landscapes? On Hahn's pictures, does 1 cm correspond to 1 cm or perhaps 1 km in reality? Measures vanish rapidly and give way to a feeling of slight apprehension. All of a sudden, in a strange way, the familiar things turn odd and the unfamiliar cozy, we feel at home again. The wrapped interiors recall rubber cells and we, the viewers, dream our private dream or nightmare, where is the difference, dreams capsize abruptly sometimes. Here, there is no escape; superimposed on one another like remote memories, scenes unroll in your head and blend dream and reality into something new, taking on a life of its own, threatening. Gray and empty, the dream of a house with garage and basement of one's own hovers in the air, and is put on a drip of obviously poisonous liquids. In the picture "Night Shift", a man, well-clad in a suit, is driving an old-fashioned cart transporting in 13 battered barrels liquids in which, apparently, people or animals (or both) have been thrown in. Obviously, he is underway on behalf of the Olympic Committee, his jacket (a postwar model) bears the Nike swoosh. But irritatingly, the liquid is being replenished from outside the edge of the picture or flooding out in a torrent upwards. Then, in "Home of the Dawn", the name "Nike" emerges once more in a kind of rabbit barn, and again on a sack besides it as symbol turned on its head. But at the end, symbols and names such as these are misleading, they mean nothing, except that they are self-referential. They are part of the reality which we know and in which we immerse ourselves every day without thinking about it.

The woodcut-like Indian ink drawings are no less troubling. More bitingly focused by the black-white contrast, they capture the atmospheric tension and condense it on the viewer's retina to a flash of inspiration. As in the picture "The Gardener" standing on a ladder who is planting a cross on the summit of a massif, or in the scene "At the Bedside" which recalls an underwater scenery, Hahn repeatedly changes the seemingly fixed paradigms in the picture, making thus everything vacillate. These contradictions guide the viewer's approach to the pictures by reminding him/her to be on his guard. The picture still remains a picture and wants to be perceived as such and should not be mistaken for reality. Within the confines of the picture, everything is possible and much conceivable. The interiors refer to constructs of ideas - here painter and viewer meet to exchange ideas, to perceive what is and what could be. Painting does take place on the picture, but becomes a perception only in the viewer's head. Thus, just as we hold a dream to be reality while dreaming, these pictures invite us to take them for real, to accept them as they are.

In a laboratory, tree fungi grow out of the wall and the ground. A table, on it boxes marked with vague human contours, again fungi and a torso with a fungus head. In front of it, a man in a white overall with a hood connected to two tubes. A naked electric bulb hangs from the ceiling. Enigmatic happening that repels interpretation. The picture triggers all kinds of associations: aliens, clone research, kit humans. And again the impression of a stage as the wall (or the ground?) does not seem to be out of solid material, but out of canvas. Hahn's pictorial worlds never create a sense of security, they always invite us to tread on dangerous grounds. On the seam between the familiar and the unfamiliar, we have to decide whether we are ready or reluctant to embark on an adventure. The unexpected can crop up at any time, each of us may spin off his/her own story from the pictures. To discover something in ourselves which we not even suspected, to feel something which we never felt before - Hahn's works makes us thirsty for sensuous adventure: where are we going, what is that for a texture, what happens next? It is never easy to leave familiar grounds and enter unknown territories, but it opens novel horizons in a broadened perspective. A style of painting which makes this possible cannot be praised highly enough.

by
Dr. Martin Stather, Mannheimer Kunstverein, 2007

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AN UNCANNY TRADITIONALIST

Eckart Hahn is an uncannily perfect painter, who entirely in accordance with tradition has a complete mastery of his handwork. The central-perspective illusionism in his pictures can hardly prevent us from recognizing his art as being a product of visual inventions from the deepest interior of his spirit. The collage-like combination of spaces and objects and the processes which at first glance appear to evade all rational understanding, which appear in these pictures, belong to the expression of this uncanniness. Fantastic spaces manifest themselves in these pictures, bound to a late-modern, alienated society, existing on the brink of catastrophe: war, ecological destruction, uninhibited machinery and idylls under attack. With their expression of a melancholy abyss, these picture worlds lie in the tradition of an artistic tradition, which ranges from Dürer’s depiction of “Melancolia” over the early baroque mannerism, romantic painting and surrealism up to David Lynch’s cinematic obsessions of the present. They name the dialectical break, which were relegated to the sidelines, at the latest by Kant's dictum of the artistically beautiful as the nature of the aesthetic: art as an expression of otherness.

The dimension of otherness, that which evades the apparent calculation of the hyper-realistic painting technique, manifests itself not least in the irrational proportions of size. These revolutionary proportion express not a nature of belonging together, by which the actuality of its original proportion is robbed: landscapes are reduced to rooms and rooms stretched to the proportions of over-whelming world-spaces. Objects loose all anchorage, where they should have firm ground under their feet. In such a way, Eckart Hahn deconstructs the traditional certainties of realistic, representative and figurative painting. The perfection of the illusionary spatial depiction, displays their artistic act of construction, its illusion based on the arrangement of belief, which here has itself become the subject of the illusionist. This painting shows how very much our conception of reality is determined through artistic techniques, be they that of painting, photography or film, and how much these techniques can be used to give the fantastical an appearance of the actual. Within this, less reality than truth comes to appearance. This is the fundamental truth, that we comprehend reality not via the laws of optical rationality, rather following the categories of our individual experience.

A submarine floats in a space which changes between exhibition room, workshop and atelier in an almost locationless manner. Illuminated by a roof light, the question cannot be answered exactly as to whether this militaristic "arc" (thus the title of the image creation) has infiltrated space, or whether this has been constructed around it. What this arc hides allows evil conjecture: is the chalk stroke of “Heil” on the hull possibly a linguistic sign from an unholy past, which has entered this room for renovation (if the submarine is let into water, we can imagine the sign as being just under the water line: the tip of the iceberg). In this picture, the arc is not a symbol of salvation, rather a collective expression of a repressed collective subconscious, eager to conserve the historical without thinking about Pandora's box. Woe betide he who opens the door to this arc.

It is not without a certain humour that Eckart Hahn shows us what he finds as significant permutations of the proportions of size in the “Manége.” The circus tent becomes the over-dimensional home of a mountain surrounded by ice. The sumo wrestler, himself a sort of mountain of flesh, prepares himself to subdue this mountain in both senses of the word. With such an image creation, it becomes recognizable how eagerly the painter Eckert Hahn not only is able to think in visual dimensions, but also how he juggles with a pictorial language the metaphoric of which, even with all its uncanniness, can be so devastatingly comical: iceberg meets flesh mountain, lets see what happens.

A lemur-like bald man in a black suit walks past the display window of an undertakers. Under the neon lamp of the singular firm, a white shroud covers a section of the window decoration or the peak of this very theatrical exhibition piece. That in this picture which makes the blood in our veins freeze is the unheeding passer-by, this man in the crowd, who is as equally anonymous as familiar. He inspires not unfounded associations to the figures from the world of early-evening science fiction, who are either themselves aliens or a manipulated by extra terrestrials.

Eckart shows us the planets from which these aliens could come in another image creation, which characteristic for the painter, shows us the other on the brink, achieving a broad spectrum of expression, from scurrile humour and sheer terror: This planet has run out of air. An umbilical cord seems to lead to a maternal pump, located outside this picture world. From the interior of the flagging shell of this sinking planet, skull-formed beings cut their way out of the leathery skin holding the prisoner. Even this planet world is an artificial invention, located on a sort of stage, to which two steps lead up from the proscenium. The back-cloth of this stage is covered by a sheet covering the star-filled background. This background could be a part of the “stars and stripes” flag, which seems to give us an final reference to a pictorial out-bidding of worlds of fascinating artificiality, associated with the dream factory of American West coast. As with this cinema, so Eckart Hahn’s “Bigger than Life.” This painting re-conquers everything stolen by the culture industry. And it is a raiding trip which leads us back into the European waters of the tradition of mannerism, baroque and surrealistic modernity.

by
Bernd Künzig, Kurator, Baden-Baden, 2007






Eckart Hahn's Selected Publications

2005
Lichtwinter, Ausstellungskatalog, Pablo's Birthday, New York
Die Hahnsche Oberfläche, Joachim Kalka Im Ausstellungskatalog Basislager, Hrsg. Städtische Galerie Ostfildern
Alltag Als Anekdote, Kai Holoch In Stuttgarter Zeitung 27.09.05
Kunst Als Anlage, Dr. Peter Funken In Doing Fine, Edition November
Gegenständliche Malerei In Württemberg, Kai Holoch In Stuttgarter Zeitung, 27.09.05
Geheimnisvolle Zeichen, Elke Eberle In Essliner Zeitung, 17.11.05
Sternenbaby, Georg Leisten In Stuttgarter Zeitung, 02.12.05

2006
Museen Auf Zeit, Dr. Helmut Jaeschke In Deutsches Ärtzeblatt 09.01.06
Arbeiten Aif Papier, Asja Kaspers Und Alexandra Wendorf In Junge Kunst Ausgabe Mai/Juni
Das Eigenleben Der Gegenstände Zwischen Raum Und Fläche, Dr. Jan Nicolaisen Und Kunst Zwische Comik Und Katastrophe, Dr. Günter Baumann Im
Ausstellungskatalog Fremde Spuren, Hrsg. Galerie Burkhard Eikelmann, Düsseldorf
Malerei Bei Eikelmann, Christine Dressler In Rheinische Post, 01.06.06
Kunst In Nrw, Annette Urban Im Katalog Des Wirtschaftsministeriums Nordrhein-Westfahlen Zur Art Moskau
Malerei Jetzt, Bernd Künzig Im Ausstellungskatalog Malerei Jetzt, Hrsg. Stadt Bühl
Werkschau Eckart Hahns In Der Reihe "Neue Positionen Im Der Malerei", Ira Betz In Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung, 09.08.06
Lend Me Your Ear, Ausstellungskatalog, Hrsg. Kunstverein Bad Salzdetfurth
Die Wundersamen Welten Des Malers Eckart Hahn, Dr. Franz-Xaver Schlegel In Kunsttermine, Ausgabe Mai/Juni
Sehnsucht Nach Arkadien, Michael-Georg Müller In Die Welt, 28.12.06
Wo Fängt Der Himmel An?, Neue Rheinische Zeitung, 18.01.07

2007
Leben An Der Nahtstelle, Dr. Martin Stather Im Ausstellungskatalog Nightshift, Hrsg Pablo's Birthday, New York
Malerei Von Eckart Hahn Bei Rothamel, Thüringische Landeszeitung, 01.03.07
Bitte Um Entschleunigung, Mathias Kubitza, In Thüringer Allgemeine. 05.03.07
Die Bildwelten Des Eckart Hahn, Wolfgang Leissling In Thüringer Allgemeine,14.03.07
Art Cologne, Ausstellungskatalog, Hrsg. Art Cologne
Kräftemessen Am Rhein, Dr. Helmut Jaeschke In Deutsches Ärzteblatt, 08.06.07
Auf Der Suche Nach Der Verlorenen Zeit, Michaela Adick In Heilbronner Stimme, 17.08.07
Der Unheimliche Traditionalist, Bernd Künzig, Baden-Baden Im Ausstellungskatalog Einsichten, Hrsg Stadtgalerie Klagenfurt
Geisteswelten Abbilden, Kärntner Tageszeitung, 29.09.07
Verkehrte Räume, Orf-Online, 28.09.07
Von Seidelbast Und Grauen Gesellen, Erwin Hirtenfelder In Kleine Zeitung, 30.09.07
Von Räumen Und Ihren Einsichten, Irina Lino In Kronen Zeitung, 14.10.07
Bildwelten Zwischen Traum Und Wirklichkeit, Arthur Bach In Junge Kunst 3/07