Simon Hantaï

515 West 27th Street, Chelsea

Through June 22

In the late 1960s the Hungarian-born artist Simon Hantaï (1922-2008) developed a versatile technique called pliage: painting canvases that had been folded and tied, and then unfurling them to reveal all-over abstractions. The unpredictable process was a kind of throwback to Surrealist automatism, which Hantaï had practiced alongside André Breton in postwar Paris, but the results looked more of their time, like Abstract Expressionism or even hippie tie-dye.

His work hasn’t been seen much in New York, partly because he stopped showing at commercial galleries in the 1980s as a gesture of resistance to the market. (MoMA owns an excellent large-scale example that isn’t on display right now.) But the market often has the last word, and

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/24/arts/design/simon-hantai.html

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