Philip Hanson
Chicago, Illinois, 1943 -
Hanson's paintings are often vibrantly colored and intricately patterned. Where his contemporaries have tended towards forthrightly sarcastic or slapstick imagery, Hanson's visual world tends to be oblique, subtle, multilayered, and sometimes romantic. His early works included a series of candy boxes, decorated with plastic flowers and bearing terse epigrams like "Eternal Passion," "Dear" and "Dreamy," as well as investigations of unusually decorated marginal architectural spaces (entranceways, mezzanines), elaborately detailed flowers, and billowing and transluscent women's clothes (including his important "Dappled Pleasure Dress" pieces). Primarily a painter, in the early years he also made etchings, mezzotints and aquatints, hand-coloring the finished prints. During the early '70s, Hanson created a series of shell-, leaf-, and flower-shaped cloth constructions, built of sewn bits of canvas that were then painted. In subsequent years, Hanson has turned to men's garments (jackets and codpieces) in his paintings, while another series explored the transformation of one object into another (a bridge into a flower or a conch into a tent, for instance). Over the last decade he has amassed an incredible body of paintings that integrate text, most often poetry, in a union with image that Hanson thinks of as being operatic.
Hanson's work was featured in a solo retrospective at the Illinois State Museum in Springfield (1985). His recent work was shown at 1926 Exhibition Studies Space (2003). He has been included in group shows at MCA (1969 and 1972); the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia (1969); the Sao Paulo Bienal (1973); the Chicago Public Library Cultural Center (1977); among many others. His work is in the permanent collections of the MCA, AIC, the National Museum of American Art, Washington, DC, and the Museum des 20 Jahrhunderts, Vienna. Hanson is represented by Corbett vs. Dempsey.
http://www.corbettvsdempsey.com/artists/hanson/hanson.html
http://www.corbettvsdempsey.com/artists/hanson/hanson.html
Person TypeIndividual
Terms
- Male
Füssen, Germany, 1952 - 2013, Freiburg, Germany
Newcastle, CA, 1965 - 2006, Los Angeles, CA
Buffalo, NY, 1883 - 1962, Woodstock, NY
Chicago, Illinois, 1939 - 2004, Chicago, Illinois
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1930 - 1987, New York, New York
Chicago, Illinois, 1940 - 2007, New York
Rochester, Indiana, 1927 - 2011, Manhattan, New York
b. 1939, San Francisco, California; d. 2024, Orient, New York