The Woman (Translation)
Die Frau (Primary Title)
Dieter Hacker, German, born 1942 (Artist)
“I am always allowing myself to be seduced into painting unbelievably beautiful paintings.” —Dieter Hacker
In the 1970s, Hacker shed his experimental, political, and conceptual approaches to art, including photography and film to take up painting. By the early 1980s, he was a central figure in Neo-Expressionism, embracing a return to an emotion-laden figurative art.
Hacker’s large, stark works project a sense of existential Cold War despair. They often show figures isolated even in a crowd, placed in desolate environments. In The Woman, the protagonist looks back at the viewer from a shadowy urban setting whose sense of foreboding recalls the anxious Berlin street scenes by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner painted some fifty years earlier.
[1] The Sydney and Frances Lewis Foundation purchased the work from Marlborough Gallery during the exhibition "Dieter Hacker Paintings and Drawings," on view February 4 - March 3, 1984.
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