Hannah van Bart

The solo exhibition by the Dutch artist Hannah van Bart will be on display in Landhuis Oud Amelisweerd from April 1 to August 20, 2023. Van Bart will use the historical chambers of the country manor to exhibit paintings from the past twenty years, yet virtually all for the first time in the Netherlands.

Hannah van Bart
Hannah van Bart (born in 1963 in Oud-Zuilen) paints portraits, still lifes and landscapes with a drawing-like character and a muted use of colour. The works, in which beauty and discomfort go hand in hand, are probing and atmospheric.

Although her art is figurative, Van Bart rarely has an existing image in mind at the outset. Common starting points are a type of light, a shimmer, a mud trail, or a reflection. She tries to reproduce a particular sensation in an explorative fashion. What does the sensation look like? What is perception and what is reality? She herself describes her creative process as a walk, a journey where a horizon beckons but the destination is unknown. 

The surface of her paintings reveals that searching process: if you look closely, you can see many layers of paint. The details of a face, a body, a landscape are added and then erased—sometimes literally. All these layers are reminiscent of memories; some vague, others clear and pronounced. They add to the work’s psychological depth. And although Van Bart never bases her characters on existing people, there is something recognizable about them, as though they stem from a collective memory.

Centraal Museum’s artistic director Bart Rutten: “Hannah van Bart once explained in an interview, ‘what I’m making are actually imaginary figures. I build an imaginary character.’ This appealed to me in particular in her work. Not the pursuit of capturing a moment, like you see in photography or a studio sketch, but a long process of turning things over in one’s mind, painting and erasing, adding and taking away.”

Hannah van Bart was trained at the Rietveld Academie and at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, both in Amsterdam. She has had several solo exhibitions in the Netherlands, including in the Kunstmuseum (The Hague) and the Cobra Museum (Amstelveen). For the past fifteen years she has mainly exhibited her work abroad, for instance at the Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York and at Vielmetter Los Angeles. Van Bart has won, among other accolades, the Philip Morris Award, the Dutch Royal Award for Modern Painting, and the Jeanne Oosting Award.

Publication
The exhibition goes hand in hand with the publication of a new and lavishly illustrated monograph on the work of Hannah van Bart, with contributions by Allie Biswas, Hans den Hartog Jager and Bart Rutten, designed by PutGootink and published by Jap Sam Books. The book is edited by Laurie Cluitmans, curator of the exhibition and curator of contemporary art at Centraal Museum. The publication is sponsored by the Jaap Hartenfonds, the Mondriaan Fonds, Marianne Boesky Gallery and Vielmetter Los Angeles.

Centraal Museum at Landhuis Oud Amelisweerd
From 2022 to 2026, the Centraal Museum is taking up residence at Oud Amelisweerd. From spring to autumn for the next five years, this beautiful country estate will form the backdrop for a solo exhibition by a renowned Dutch contemporary artist. On the first floor of the mansion, the museum will give artists carte blanche to present works that interact with the historical interiors. Hannah van Bart is the third artist in this series of exhibitions and her paintings will be on display from 1 April to 20 August 2023. 

This programme is a partner project of the Hartwig Art Foundation.