Hannah van Bart
“Inner Homeland”
New York, 509 West 24th Street
Throughout van Bart’s intimate, atmospheric paintings, haunting landscapes and imagined figures materialize out of dense, painterly fogs. Drawing inspiration from a host of disparate sources—from the warm golden light of the Dutch Old Masters to the gestural freedom of Abstract Expressionism—van Bart articulates the physical and emotional contours of her forms with remarkable psychological depth, evoking at once a sense of longing and unease, of inescapable familiarity and acute uncertainty.
Untitled, 2024 Oil on linen Photo credit: Frankie Tyska
With Inner Homeland van Bart turns her focus to the landscape, imbuing her settings with a potent sense of freedom. Recently, van Bart has returned to a group of pencil drawings she made in the early 1980s as a young artist living in Oud-Zuilen—the Dutch village near Utrecht where she grew up. In these intimate drawings, van Bart captured dense, wooded landscapes and sparse meadows. Filtered through leafy canopies, dappled sunlight shines on forest floors marked by subtle fencing and evocative houses emerging from the trees. Made more than 40 years ago, the drawings are unmistakably van Bart’s—the careful repetition of the line, the emotive quality of light, and the unmistakable sensation of feelings remembered all so characteristic of the artist’s hand.
For the new works in Inner Homeland, van Bart borrows from these drawings—as well as more recent drawings—reimagining anthropomorphic houses, fragments of forests, and lengths of fencing into delicate, ethereal paintings. These paintings are products of time: van Bart works in layers, building up the surfaces over time, erasing and reworking as she goes. Each painting contains a fleeting moment that has been turned over and over again in one’s mind as areas of loosely smudged paint creating a tangible sense of memories just out of reach.
