ALLEN ANTHONY HANSEN - GENERAL STATEMENT


Allen Hansen was born in the 50’s in a suburb of Los Angeles. His parents were dedicated, amateur painters. He worked on weekends with his father, a roofer, under the sky with the grid of the suburbs below.
He studied art at University of California, Irvine with Craig Kauffman whose attention to materiality was a strong influence. Craig Kauffman often used the sensuous physical properties of materials as an emphasis for his sculptures and paintings. 
Hansen's work has always dealt with the urge to the sublime whether in abstracted landscape or diagramming the unknowable. The use of the diagram process becomes a source for abstraction and a way of unveiling invisible symmetries.


ALLEN ANTHONY HANSEN – 2021

Allen Hansen’s abstractions have emerged out of his work in the neo-romantic landscape traditions; he continues to use a fictitious light source that evokes an affinity to the real and a dialogue that references time, place, and memory. The new work reduces complexities to their most elemental in order to reference a sensory geography.  

In this imagined geography, his newest work includes indeterminate geometries, coils and spirals, unraveling and universal in its symbolism.

ALLEN ANTHONY HANSEN - ROOFING TAR STATEMENT 

"Allen Hansen was born in the 50’s in a suburb of Los Angeles. His parents were dedicated, amateur painters.
Allen Hansen,originally a skilled Neo-Romantic landscape painter, has been working for the past two decades as a Minimalist after a progressive transformation of continuously minimalizing his landscapes until the question arose: "Where do you go when you get rid of the horizon line..?” 
Hansen's work has always dealt with the urge to the sublime, whether in abstracted landscape or diagramming the unknowable. The use of the diagram process becomes a source for abstraction, and a way of unveiling invisible symmetries. A fictitious light source and the occasional color on his dark canvases, painted with roofing tar (a medium shaped by his personal childhood memories as son of a roofer) leave the viewer with all but no substantiated image, and rather with a sense of time and space.
“Hansen describes his process as finding himself and being interested in what contains and is contained by the number 0 rather than in the abstracted jug of water. In other words, Hansen is preserving the atmosphere of a landscape void of its horizon line. Subsequently, by keeping the light source, or more generally, the value of light in lieu of the horizon line, has become Hansen's new point of reference for his execution and direction for the viewer. A challenge to the eye's forever restless search for reference points in the quest to discover “what is there”- Hansen's depiction of an 'atmosphere of nothingness', (beyond light and color), keeps his audience guessing, and reaching out into the dense void of a carefully calculated composition.”  


– Priska Juschka, Lichtundfire 

Hansen studied art at University of California, Irvine with Craig Kauffman whose attention to materiality was a strong influence. Craig Kauffman often used the sensuous physical properties of materials as an emphasis for his sculptures and paintings



ALLEN ANTHONY HANSEN - BLUEPRINTS STATEMENT 

"Blueprints allow a vision of the unseen. 
They are xray-like; allowing us to see the bones of architecture, imagine enormous objects, and fathom their substructure. The blueprint's insoluble ferroferricyanide - called Turnball's blue and identical to Prussian Blue - becomes the color linked to the expression of systems and planning." 

-- D. Jenks, D. Hylnski  & L. Griggs


 The use of the diagrammatic process becomes a source for abstraction and a way of unveiling of invisible symmetries.
The drawings for this series were done on velum which was reminiscent of the paper I had used in high school while studying industrial drafting. The memory of the blueprint machine created an urge to work with blueprints was too fascinating to ignore.  Blueprints led me to think of landscape differently.  I began working with the artificial landscapes of the mind. The work continues to evolve.  I'm still exploring the enormous possibilities in this line of thought.  


The blueprint blue background has again become atmospheric and the archetypal, industrial symbols are becoming guiding maps and diagrams.  




ALLEN ANTHONY HANSEN - EXPLOSION SERIES STATEMENT 

This series of works are based on observations of explosions; an unfortunate part of our current visual vernacular. While explosions are devastating unto themselves there is a perverse beauty to the visual experience. Formally I was interested in the punctured atmosphere that occurs just after an explosion and 
the retinal aftermath. The drawings are closer to the actual visual effect while the paintings are more about process and the materiality of the painting process. The use of white paint almost exclusively is a reinterpretation of smoke and atmosphere. Using a singular theme allows to explore a wide range of options within a strict formal format. For the past 20 years I have been working with the idea of American tradition of the abstract sublime while incorporating contemporary ideas about concept and process, with the hopes of creating works that are both a visual and conceptual experience.