Hans Burkhardt

Art Brokerage: Hans Burkhardt American Artist: b. 1904-1994. The prolific Artist Hans Burkhardt joined the Cal State Northridge faculty in the 1960s and maintained a close relationship with the University throughout the rest of his life. The retrospective at the CSUN Gallery included paintings, drawings, and prints selected from the generous donation of nearly one thousand works the artist made to the University Collection. The exhibit thus provides a wide breadth of the artist's oeuvre; ranging from his early works done in New York in the 1930s to paintings inspired by his extended travels in Mexico in the '50s and '60s to powerful images protesting the destruction of war, which he produced throughout his career. Switzerland-native Hans Burkhardt immigrated to New York in 1924, where he befriended and worked with seminal artists such as Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning. Before moving to Los Angeles in 1937, he had mastered geometric abstraction and expressionism. He worked through cubism and surrealism and arrived at an early form of abstract expressionism, later employing these modernist modes to communicate the full spectrum of human experience, including spirituality, hope, anguish, and joy. Hans Burkhardt spent most of his career in Los Angeles. But his abstract paintings, especially those made during the 1960s, have little of the light or air typically associated with West Coast painters of the era. These death-haunted images draw their expressive textures from techniques developed working in 1930s New York, and their morbid mood from Mexican influences he encountered while traveling south to paint. One painting turns the red circle on a box of Lucky Strike cigarettes into a festering sore. Several Vietnam-themed works that incorporate actual human skulls are not only striking but downright scary. Hans Burkhardt and Arshile Gorky were close friends and he was greatly affected by Gorky's suicide. Art Brokerage CEO was a student of Hans Burkhardt at Cal State Northridge and is always interested in purchasing his paintings. Listings wanted by Art Brokerage.