Simon HANTAÏ

Early Years Simon Hantai was a Hungarian-born French abstract painter best-known for developing his technique of pliage (folding). Hantai was temporarily blind at age 8, an experience that later influenced his unconventional artistic methods. He attended the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest where he studied from István Szőnyi. Later he moved to France with his wife in 1948. He was a member of the Roman Scholarship Winning Artists Group alongside with Judit Reigl, Lipót Böhm Poldi, Antal Bíró, and Sándor Zugor. In August, they spent ten days in Venice in the company of old and new friends during the 24th Biennial, where they took the opportunity to immerse themselves in the best of contemporary European art. Cézanne, Van Gogh and Picasso opened up entirely new horizons for Hantai, who absorbed as much of the new influences as he could. He was influenced by abstract expressionism and surrealism and artists like Jackson Pollock, Pierre Soulages, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp and Joan Miró. About his Art Enveloped in post-war France, Hantai further pursued his interests in avant-garde art and set out to reinvent painting. Hantai’s work of the 1950s drew from Surrealist and Art Brut techniques, in addition to biomorphic and geometric forms. His large-scale calligraphic paintings are based on the application of grattage and on highly saturated colors that often evoke the contemporaneous work of Judit Reigl.  Most of Hantai's gestural paintings from this period feature a sensual rhythm of large undulating forms that preserves the pace and trajectory of his gestures. The first-ever Hantai exhibition opened on 23 January 1953, and featured several works that reappeared at the 'HANTAI' retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in 2013, including La jeune mouche D. s’envole (“The young fly D. is flying away”, 1950), Elle seule doit y toucher (“She alone may touch it”, 1952), and Le Narcisse collectif (“Collective Narcissus”, 1952). Hantai – under the spell of new visual exper Show more