Amsterdam-based artist Hannah van Bart (b. 1963) investigates the mechanics of interior and exterior life in her art, creating portraits that incorporate both found imagery and her own memory or imagination of her subjects’ inner stories. Her paintings and works on paper typically present a central, lone figure as van Bart carefully considers each person’s psychological landscape. Van Bart's painting vocabulary is marked by distinctive outlines, repeated patterning, and intensely layered brushwork, which she couples with expressionist color—saturated hues and matte palettes. Her figures are both fixed and unfixed forms situated within a dark and dreamy realm, offering elusive, idiosyncratic portraits with a wide-range of fluctuating expressions. (http://www.marianneboeskygallery.com/artists/hannah-van-bart/bio) The intimately scaled portrait paintings featured in the exhibition engage viewers in an investigation of mood and atmosphere, highlighting van Bart’s innate ability to capture the psychologies and personas of her invented figures. Van Bart draws inspiration from found images and fragments of personal experiences, gravitating to a single element; a bent elbow, a piece of clothing, or a gesture, for example, which she then reinterprets through an array of characters that she develops organically on the canvas. The women and men that spring from her imagination exist in a timeless space; their clothing offering the only subtle hints to a specific era or background. In stripping her figures of cultural and historic orientation, van Bart amplifies the significance of gaze, posture, and pose to convey attitude, personality, and psychology. This poignant inward focus elicits at once a deep intimacy and a hollowing distance between the viewer and the subject. Van Bart approaches her paintings as a singular whole, blurring the formal boundaries between foreground and background ... (http://dutchcultureusa.com/blog/3449/hannah-van-bart-at-marianne-boesky-gallery) undefined

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