Prof. Gavin Robson
University of Newcastle upon Tyne
University of Newcastle upon Tyne
" What's Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba, That he should weep for her?"
Hamlet Act II Scene II
The search for nurture in the art of the past is frequently a source of anxiety for today's painter.
The reductive reasoning of successive waves of the avant-garde has construed sympathy as sickly dependence, a failure to acknowledge the need for a year zero in which the art of the museums is swept away by an exemplary art of the present moment. To have regard for what painters before us have done is by this reasoning to indulge in a form of self examination which disables our capacity for acting in the here and now - to be of our time. At its most extreme, for theorists who see no meaningful distinction between the activities of the artist as an artist and the living of her life in other ways, history as a tool of individual retrospection is a paralysing encumbrance. As if this were not trouble enough historians of art have come increasingly to promote a view of art as a system of signposts pointing to problematic social or political realities. The banishment of aesthetics from such a scheme leaves no significant place for the connections worked out through practice of one painter with another. Painting is reduced to a set of illustrations to histories unconnected to its own.
Hannah Finlator is deeply aware of the conflicts involved in the interrogation of her artistic genealogy. She is, however sustained by the knowledge that paintings from the past live in the present. Finlator is alert to, but not in awe of those censoring voices which seek to exclude the possibility that expressive sympathies can be awakened in the work of past centuries. The physical survival of that work guarantees that the art of the past must also be the art of today.
Finlator's works hold unique and complex conversations with the past made present.
In any painter's dialogue with art from the past there is inevitably a one sided act of translation.
It follows that the incorporation of ideas and motifs into a contemporary context carries a sense almost of the exotic. The energy, which develops in this dislocation, is exploited by Hannah Finlator in her reflections on the works of Van Hemessen and Anguissola. This energy passes as a frisson to the viewer who senses that the nature of the encounter between painter and painter contains an element of the ghostly. This shift in perception is similar to that induced in the viewing of certain kinds of modern work where the collage principle permits the introduction of unexpected or rootless elements. Finlator is at ease dealing with this uneasiness.
Finlator has held so many conversations with so many. Not with ghosts but with immortals.
HANNAH VERENA FINLATOR
REVIEWS
REVIEWS
INTRODUCTION: ARTIST AND INFLUENCES St. Mary's College, MD, US.
Colby Caldwell
Founder of REVOLVE art space
Visiting Professor art Warren Wilson College, Asheville, NC.
Founder of REVOLVE art space
Visiting Professor art Warren Wilson College, Asheville, NC.
This evening's visiting artist is a painter first: a painter who continues to find ways to reinvest art history- or a wonderful alternative to it- with valid and engaging contemporary issues. She is a determined historian; she has lectured on forgotten or marginalized 16-17 century women painters to uncover their visual language, their innovations and -maybe more importantly- their suppressed or subverted narratives.
Hannah reinvests and re-imagines art history, not to pillage but to re/interpret art history. While it's obvious she studies these processes, Hannah brings a refreshing 21st century sensibility of narrative and experimentation. Hannah may share some surface qualities with other figurative painters, but her work deepens art history's connection to our daily lives by investing post-modern concerns with the personal, without easy irony or one-liners. Hannah redirects art history texts. Her subjects are active, aware, and determining their own narrative. I would not say Hannah's paintings are forthright, in fact they are embedded in mystery and full of puzzling inferences. By combining her family history with figures, symbolism and iconography from centuries before, Hannah provides insight to the hidden stories both in her own personal narrative and into her biological and artistic forbearers. Her work is both meditative and active. It reinvigorates the past by continually shifting time frames, landscape and metaphors into something alive. Her work transcends assumptions of post-modernism by reintegrating the social with the personal.
SPLIT PANEL: An exhibition of diptychs
Gallery at the Piano Factory Boston, MA.
2010
Hannah Finlator has assembled eight new works made up of two and three panel groupings. Flat plates or boards being attached at a hinge goes back to antiquity and is still a format employed by artists today. Taking direct inspiration from art of the middle ages and Renaissance, Finlator focused this series on diptychs which were betrothal commissions, church altarpieces, portable devotionals, and private icons.
The panel entitled, Ella me Pintó, is the only work in the series on single panel and thereby sets out Finlator's use of composition to establish time and figure correlations. The central subject is abruptly divided into two halves of a related narrative. On the right, the image of artist Sofinisba Anguissola looks from her easel while painting the images to the left, which are a leaning woman and a child within a dream-like landscape. The text above is backwards and translates, "she painted me in Spain"; the "she" referring to subjects in both sections of the painting.
Some panels in the exhibition are fixed by hinges, others connect via composition, narrative, or a continuous landscape. Carefully detailed imagery within individual panels, such as fruits and plants, recall iconography of the past, but suggest further purpose through Finlator's displacement and reorganization. In Diptych with Twig of Lemons, still-life-like gestures of the figures which cross the divide of the panels, an unlit candle, and the ghost-like appearance of Minerva Anguissola from The Chess Players, all give rise to multiple sources of thought and connection.
Similarly, the text inscriptions in Finlator's works offer another dimension in pair with their visual encapsulations. In Diptych with Twig of Lemons, Finlator takes a famous excerpt from Hannah Arendt out of context, and reads verbatim, The cultural treasures of the past, believed to be dead, are being made to speak, in the course of which it turns out that they propose things altogether different than what had been thought.
Finlator also uses the multi-panel format to elaborate portraiture via various related components, comparable to religious altarpieces which open and close to reveal different representations around a central biblical topic. The Triptych of the Artist's Brother is a portrait of Finlator's brother as a child holding an apple looking towards the viewer against a spacious field and distant tree. At the base of the panel is a scribbled text taken from Finlator's brother's post-graduate research. The left wing of the triptych is a portrait of his wife (Moire), and the right panel opens to a double-portrait sibling composition.
Within the Split Panel series the past is visualized as a template for current and future expressions. Finlator's series shows how the multi-panel format is visually energetic but also meaningful: it allows for thoughtful correspondence with timeless themes: each other, our connections, what was, and where we may be going. See Family Portrait with Christ and the Woman of Samaria (Lavinia Fontana, 1603); Diptych with Mothers and Children; Triptych of the Artist's Brother; and Diptych with Twig of Lemons.
INTER ART GALERIE REICH
Inh. Dipl.-Kfm. Herbert Reich
Die Ausstellung zeigt Ölgemälde der deutsch-amerikanischen Künstlerin Hannah Verena Finlator aus ihrer jüngsten Schaffenszeit.
Die 1977 geborene Künstlerin wuchs im amerikanischen Bundesstaat North Carolina auf und erhielt ihre schulische und künstlerische Ausbildung in den USA (Bachelor of Fine Arts 2000). Nach Abschluß ihres kunsthistorischen Studiums in Großbritannien (Master of Fine Arts 2002) kehrte sie ins Geburtsland ihrer Mutter zurück und wählte Köln zu ihrem Domizil.
In Finlators vornehmlich figurativer Kunst vereinen sich, nicht untypisch für cross-kulturelle Tendenzen der heutigen Kunstwelt, Anklänge an ihre amerikanische Heimat mit Referenzen auf ihr europäisches Erbe. Eine besondere Anziehung übt auf sie die Kunst der Renaissance aus. Sie fällt damit nicht aus der Zeit, sondern nutzt die Tradition als Anregung für ihre symbolhafte Bildsprache. Ihre Figurenkonstellationen wirken durch eine gewisse Zwiespältigkeit, indem sie Wärme und Geborgenheit suchend zugleich Reserve und Einsamkeit ahnen lassen.
Speziell Sofonisba Anguissola (ca. 1532-1625), die als erfolgreichste Porträtmalerin am spanischen Königshof wirkte, hat Finlator inspiriert. Sie verweist als Zitat auf manche ihrer Gemälde und verdichtet somit ihre eigenen Werke zu einem Zusammenspiel von traditioneller Ikonographie und Motiven aus ihrem familiären Umfeld. Augenfällig wird dieser geradezu mystische Dialog zwischen den Epochen z.B. im Bild “Ella me pintó” (Sie hat mich gemalt). Es zeigt die Malerin Anguissola, mit einem Pinsel in der Hand in direktem Blickkontakt mit dem Betrachter, vor einem angedeuteten Selbstbildnis von Finlator. Hierin kommt ihre tiefempfundene Bewunderung für eine in der Kunstwelt reussierende Frau am restriktiven Hofe Philipps II. zum Ausdruck.
Finlators Gemälde, die mehrmals international ausgestellt wurden, bestechen durch ihre der Renaissance entlehnte Malweise in Öl auf Birkenholz. Kritiker haben ihre Werke mit dem Begriff des interpretativen Realismus charakterisiert.
Inh. Dipl.-Kfm. Herbert Reich
Neue Langgasse 2 50667 Köln
Pressetext, 2012
Die Ausstellung zeigt Ölgemälde der deutsch-amerikanischen Künstlerin Hannah Verena Finlator aus ihrer jüngsten Schaffenszeit.
Die 1977 geborene Künstlerin wuchs im amerikanischen Bundesstaat North Carolina auf und erhielt ihre schulische und künstlerische Ausbildung in den USA (Bachelor of Fine Arts 2000). Nach Abschluß ihres kunsthistorischen Studiums in Großbritannien (Master of Fine Arts 2002) kehrte sie ins Geburtsland ihrer Mutter zurück und wählte Köln zu ihrem Domizil.
In Finlators vornehmlich figurativer Kunst vereinen sich, nicht untypisch für cross-kulturelle Tendenzen der heutigen Kunstwelt, Anklänge an ihre amerikanische Heimat mit Referenzen auf ihr europäisches Erbe. Eine besondere Anziehung übt auf sie die Kunst der Renaissance aus. Sie fällt damit nicht aus der Zeit, sondern nutzt die Tradition als Anregung für ihre symbolhafte Bildsprache. Ihre Figurenkonstellationen wirken durch eine gewisse Zwiespältigkeit, indem sie Wärme und Geborgenheit suchend zugleich Reserve und Einsamkeit ahnen lassen.
Speziell Sofonisba Anguissola (ca. 1532-1625), die als erfolgreichste Porträtmalerin am spanischen Königshof wirkte, hat Finlator inspiriert. Sie verweist als Zitat auf manche ihrer Gemälde und verdichtet somit ihre eigenen Werke zu einem Zusammenspiel von traditioneller Ikonographie und Motiven aus ihrem familiären Umfeld. Augenfällig wird dieser geradezu mystische Dialog zwischen den Epochen z.B. im Bild “Ella me pintó” (Sie hat mich gemalt). Es zeigt die Malerin Anguissola, mit einem Pinsel in der Hand in direktem Blickkontakt mit dem Betrachter, vor einem angedeuteten Selbstbildnis von Finlator. Hierin kommt ihre tiefempfundene Bewunderung für eine in der Kunstwelt reussierende Frau am restriktiven Hofe Philipps II. zum Ausdruck.
Finlators Gemälde, die mehrmals international ausgestellt wurden, bestechen durch ihre der Renaissance entlehnte Malweise in Öl auf Birkenholz. Kritiker haben ihre Werke mit dem Begriff des interpretativen Realismus charakterisiert.
HENSHELWOOD GALLERY Newcastle UK.
Andrew HeardCurator, Program Manager Ushaw Historic House, Durham, UK.
2002
Finlator's paintings also operate on a theoretical basis. Her understanding of the ways paintings were realised five hundred years ago is evident; each work is founded upon precise draughtsmanship, but the works develop beyond her initial drawings. Finlator explains that she will often embark on a picture without a full vision of what will ultimately result. The attitude of a hand or arm, for example, may change from imprimatura to finished glaze, giving her paintings lightness and fluidity.
The way in which Finlator's paintings are constructed through the application of subsequent layers
of pigment is mirrored in the relationship she builds with the people she represents: her paintings reflect a relationship in development. The subjects are generally people Finlator knows and thus appear to come from a participant's rather than a spectator's point of view, for instance, in her works showing a group of people around a table (a recurring theme in Finlator's work). By association this gives the viewer insight into those portrayed with a great sense of intimacy. This approach Finlator cites directly from painters van Hemessen and Anguissola whom she regularly makes visual reference to in her own panels.
The scope of Finlator's investigation extends specifically to less known women painters and works
of anonymous masters (such as the Dutch Master van Alkaamar, visually quoted in Finlator's Portrait
of a Man Sitting on a Rock). For her, the absence of the artist's identity prompts the viewer to engage with a work without predetermined expectation. This exhibition offers viewers an opportunity to engage with Hannah Finlator's work the same way.
HATTON GALLERY, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
Prof. John Milner
Courtault Institute of Art, London, UK
Courtault Institute of Art, London, UK
2002
Hannah Finlator’s figurative works are painted on gesso panels using transparent paint. This dialogue with past techniques, and figurative compositions, supports her desire for narrative. Addressing past art effectively is an opportunity that hangs in the air before every painter. But these autobiographical and imaginative paintings focus experiences of people and places in an intense narrative of relationships and identity. The large double portrait refers to Dürer’s Adam and Eve.
It helps to construct the painting, but the painting relentlessly searches for identity through contemporary experience.
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