Vielmetter Los Angeles is pleased to present Hannah Van Bart: New Paintings, a group of new works by the Amsterdam-based artist and her first solo exhibition in Los Angeles. Comprising of portraits and landscapes, Van Bart’s paintings are focused on emulating a particular mood or emotional landscape in lieu of representing real people or places. When painting, Van Bart relies on mark-making and her painterly dexterity to create compositions with an aim to portray a particular light and psychological space.

Throughout Van Bart’s works, there is an element of familiarity, the portraits and landscape are classically informed yet steer from the stereotypical context of such painting traditions. Van Bart paints her subjects without a preconceived notion of what they will reveal, instead, she is more interested in exploring paint and mark making as a process to explore expressions of longing and loss. Self-described as “imaginary portraits,” her paintings hinge on the landscape of imagination to conjure a sense of discovery and exploration. For Van Bart, the process of painting is about experimenting with subtle shifts in light, tone, and color to exude a felt experience. She says, “In a landscape, the collars and buttons would be pools of water or edges of a house or tree. It is a way of looking for space and light. I see the faces, figures, and landscapes all as places where I want to be. Painting as to answer the question: “how to get there?”’.

About the artist

Hannah Van Bart (b. 1963) studied at Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam and Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam. She has had solo exhibitions at Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York, NY; Galerie Bob van Orsouw, Zurich, Switzerland; Galerie Tanya Rumpff, Haarlem, The Netherlands; Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, the Hague, The Netherlands; Cobra Museum of Modern Art, Amstelveen, The Netherlands, among others. She has been included in numerous group exhibitions at Centraal Museum, Utrecht, Netherlands;  Chazen Museum of Art, Madison, Wisconsin; Rubell Family Collection, Miami, FL;  Het Noordbrabants Museum, Den Bosch The ABN AMRO Art Foundation, Hertogenbosch, The Netherlands; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Amsterdam, The Netherlands,; 11th Lyon Biennale, Musee d’art contemporain de Lyon, Lyon, France; Singer Laren, Van Cobra tot Dumas, Laren, The Netherlands, among others. Her works are in the collections of Centraal Museum, Utrecht, The Netherlands; Chazen Museum of Art, Madison, WI; Gemeentemuseum, The Hague, The Netherlands; Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH; Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence, RI; Teylers Museum, Haarlem, NY.