until 19.01. | #4118ARTatBerlin | DIEHL shows from 25. November 2023 (Opening: 24.11.) the exhibition “Rot geht mit allen Farben” by the artist Hal Busse.
“Beginning of new experiments, coloured reliefs, spatial additions. And, at the end of a hot summer’s day (Leuze, crowds of people) new paintings. Added elements. Colour, colour, colour rhythms.” [1]
When Hal Busse wrote these lines in her diary in 1957, the creative activity of the artist, born in Jagstfeld, southern Germany in 1926, was entirely determined by colour. The frenzy of colour, as she alludes to it in writing, finds its counterpart in brilliant colour spaces that transport colour beyond the pictorial space into the real space.
The artistic work of Hal Busse, who until 1954 was a student of protagonists such as Manfred Henninger and Willi Baumeister at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart, was always inspired by her sensual experience of the world around her. At the end of the 1950s, abstraction defined the artist’s genre-rich oeuvre, which, in addition to painting, also included works on paper, prints, wall reliefs, freestanding objects, architectural designs and, finally, “Kunst am Bau” (art in construction).
Structure, reduction and dynamism are decisive aspects of Hal Busse’s artistic activity in the late 1950s, in which she seeks to activate colour as a “physical FORCE”[2]. The exhibition Rot geht mit allen Farben at Galerie Volker Diehl focuses on her painterly work from this period.
The exhibition is accompanied by a publication dedicated to an artist’s book draft by Hal Busse from 1957. For the first time, it provides an insight into the artist’s visual, theoretical and poetic reflections on her creative work.
Claudia Kudinova
[1] Hal Busse: Diary 1957-1958, entry on 22.09.1957, Archiv Hal Busse, Hamburg, WVZ-HB-J-TB-07719.
[2] Hal Busse: Diary 1959-1965, entry on 20.01.1960, Archiv Hal Busse, Hamburg, WVZ-HV-J-TB-07720.
Opening: Friday, 24. November 2023, 6 – 8 pm
Exhibition dates: Saturday, 25. November until Friday, 19. January 2024
To the gallery
Image caption: Hal Busse, Struktur, 1958, oil on hardboard, 42,5 x 54 cm, Archiv Hal Busse, Berlin, photo by Marcus Schneider
Exhibition Hal Busse – DIEHL | Zeitgenössische Kunst in Berlin | Contemporary Art | Exhibitions Berlin Galleries | ART at Berlin