Reviews

Dryly Breaking Color Harmonies

The 81-year-old Osmund Hansen paints in a clear form- and color language that the eyes can rest on.

Paintings by Osmund Hansen at Stalke Galleri, Copenhagen,

The 81-year-old Osmund Hansen’s steady and persistent work with the still life is impressive. It is because he, for instance, manages to paint a piece of cloth and have it stand just as firm and fixed as a solid core. Quiet, calm surfaces, often dissected by diagonals that form and emphasize new compositions, have been created by Osmund Hansen, disturbed by side motifs. A way has been paved for this, and his painting has acquired sharp and precise concrete shapes that stand in contrast to the other forms' softness and organic diffuse character.

The titles suggest that it is the seemingly small part that controls the big. Two small, blue and green rectangles lie like gunpowder in relation to a diagonal red surface, which ends in a black corner. Osmund Hansen’s aesthetics are based on a departure from the harmony of balance towards the unsettling and questioning – he dares to take a stand against color harmony. One of the most striking compositions in green – with a horse motif against a new painting – at the same time shows a return to the themes that decades ago brought Osmund Hansen into movement as a painter: the landscape and nature. The green composition is tight, concentrated, with new image-structure structures that hold the colors together into a contrast-full, compact form. A clear form- and color language that the eyes can rest on.

An illustrated book has been published for the exhibition by North Information with an engaging text about Osmund Hansen written by the expert Torben Weirup.

Ann L. Sørensen

Osmund Hansen

Over 80 years old and still in command of color. Osmund Hansen’s large canvases still possess a freshness. He is a truly unique artistic figure with a distinctive career. A frequent exhibitor in the 1930s and the following decades, he was almost entirely out of the picture in the 1970s, only to experience a complete rebirth here in the 1980s, realized on the foundation of a lifetime of persistent struggle with the fundamental elements of painting: the line, the surface, the depth, and the color.

One thing that strikes you in Osmund Hansen’s paintings is their solid weight, both in material treatment and color choices. This solidity ensures that his works do not fall into light elegance. He is Nordic in his sense for earth, clay, golden light, and cool glow. Where the compositional appears as a thin scaffolding – an excuse for painting at all – the color is the artist’s real concern. Osmund Hansen chooses few colors. One painting is completely dominated by green tones, but across this green field a blue beam is placed. And then it is a painting. Or a large area is almost hidden by a big red surface, over which a large rectangle is laid.

The two colors are in a dynamic dialogue with each other, and this vibration tells us that the inspiration for it all is drawn from experiences in nature.

The color is thoroughly worked with an earthy sensibility, and the pictorial effect is marked by concentration. In Osmund Hansen’s universe, there is nothing superfluous and nothing distracting.

Ole Nørlyng

Berlingske Tidende 1.9.1989

Lyrical Fieldwork
New lithographs by Osmund Hansen

Lyrical fieldwork. It is a doubly meaningful title for a beautiful lithographic portfolio by the 81-year-old painter Osmund Hansen. Doubly, because one can see Osmund Hansen’s continued and persistent struggle with his subject as a kind of ongoing exploration of his artistic language. And because Osmund Hansen’s canvases, practically always, at least over the past twenty years, are characterized by fields. Large, soft fields in an interplay of colors. These works are quite lyrical in their expression, where the recognizability is gone and replaced by shapes floating in space.

Osmund Hansen has, in recent years, made a strong comeback. Personal disappointment over the narrowness of the Danish art world had led him to retreat into a kind of voluntary exile. In the 1930s and 1940s, he was a prominent figure in Danish art while also working at NESA, where he ended up as an office manager. A middle-class position did not really fit into the environment around Charlottenborg, so Osmund Hansen focused on local exhibition activities in Gentofte. The comeback has been significant, both for the artist Osmund Hansen and for inspiring him to produce his very best work.

The portfolio with the four lyrical fieldworks, which also includes a foreword by critic Bent Irve, has been printed in an edition of 260 copies at UM Grafik. The lithographs can currently be seen at Art Focus in Åbenrå 29 in Copenhagen – and later in Osmund Hansen’s usual gallery, Stalke Gallery, also in Copenhagen. The exhibition is part of a broader retrospective that celebrates the work of Osmund Hansen on August 17.

By Torben Weirup

Berlingske Tidende 

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