Exposition / Duncan Hannah à Los Angeles
DUNCAN HANNAH
at
PARKER GALLERY, LOS ANGELES
On view until May 26th, 2018
2441 Glendower Ave, Los Angeles
California, USA
Article dans Purple Diary
PURPLE MAGAZINE
Parker Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of paintings by Duncan Hannah. The exhibition celebrates the release of his book, Twentieth-Century Boy: Notebooks of the Seventies, published by Knopf. Where Notebooks of the Seventies chronicles the youthful indiscretions of an art student caught up in the debauchery of Downtown New York, the exhibition by contrast focuses on Hannah’s anachronistic aesthetic. A proficient painter working in a descriptive and representational style, one would expect Hannah to have been more of a fixture at the National Arts Club than Max’s Kansas City.
The exhibition opens with Drunk, a full figure self-portrait from 1976, and covers the spectrum of subjects that have become trademark Hannah: clandestine encounters, European automobiles, Art Deco cinemas, film noir, nudes, fighter planes and literary heroes. The exhibition includes one work, The Waiting (1980), from his debut solo show at the Stefanotti Gallery in 1981.
Remarkable in Hannah’s oeuvre is an unwavering commitment to a narrative style of painting reminiscent of Edward Hopper and Walter Sickert. His canvases act as cinematic tableaux of an idyllic world where a touring car whisks Lee Remick away for a countryside picnic, returning in time for the Truffaut double-feature. In Hannah’s halcyon world, the mood is often tainted with a touch of intrigue. Fireflies (2012) depicts a young boy examining a glass jar, presumably containing the titular subject, yet the expression on the face of his companion gives pause. The Shipwreck Boys in Yorkshire (2006) anticipates a derring-do Hardy Boys mystery and instead delivers a seemingly innocent game of cricket. Paradise lost is found again in Duncan Hannah.
Photos © Darren Ankenman