Untitled (T1958-3) 1958

Hans Hartung made this untitled painting in 1958 with a brush and dark paint on canvas. Imagine the act of painting itself, how this artwork came into being, shifting and emerging through trial, error, and intuition. I sympathize with Hartung and wonder what it might have been like to create this. What might he have been thinking when he made it? The paint is thin, and the colour is simple. I see the marks as something like thoughts shooting across the surface. It almost feels like he’s trying to capture something fleeting. The long downward gestures feel like a release of energy, and the overall effect is like a snapshot of a dynamic process. Gestural abstraction is like that, the artist seems to be saying, ‘painting isn’t just about making a picture, it's about bearing witness to the act of creation itself.’