Raymond Hains

Résumé éditeur

Throughout his life, French artist Raymond Hains (1926?2005) proved a constant innovator, who in his art always found new means of expression and new ways of finding and presenting images. Immediately after the Second World War he experimented with photograms and optical distortion through camera lenses, in what he termed hypnagogic photography. In the 1950s, he took torn posters from the billboards of the city and offered them as paintings, suggesting an affichiste alternative closer to life than spiritually suffused abstract expressionism. In 1960 he was among the original founders of Nouveau Realisme and carried the grim reality of construction hoardings into the gallery space. He then discovered the possibilities inherent in word play and framed the resulting juxtapositions and narratives in photographs, or collected them in suitcases full of curious findings. He discovered street sculptures at the margins of the cityscape and photographed them, too. Around the new millennium, he began a series of macintoshages, collages of pop-up windows grabbed from a computer screen, while he also developed neon sculptures after the Borromean knots of psychiatrist Jacques Lacan. 0Exhibition: Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin-Charlottenburg, Germany (10.10.-14.11.2015)