'Metamorfosi, 1977' by Diana Hansen, Geometric Abstract, Berkeley, Rome, Native American, Navajo, Hopi

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Description

Signed lower right, 'D. Hansen' for Diana Hansen (American, born 1942) and dated February, 1977; titled, lower left, 'Metamorfosi', with … Read more Signed lower right, 'D. Hansen' for Diana Hansen (American, born 1942) and dated February, 1977; titled, lower left, 'Metamorfosi', with number and limitation, '89/100'.
Paper dimensions: 24 x 19.75 inches

The art of Diana Hansen forges a unique combination of the traditional and the personal. Her paintings and prints use traditional techniques and images as a framework for Hansen's own experience of the world; a view of reality that transcends the individual and seeks the universal. "As an artist, I am influenced by everything," Hansen observes, "but my work actually comes from another reality; it is another way of seeing."

The greater part of her life has been dedicated to the "other reality", one that has aligned with the ways of the American Indian. Born in San Francisco in 1942 and a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, Hansen has lived and worked in Rome since 1963. Her environment, however, has not influenced her art as much as her involvement with American Indian art and culture and she has also written a number of books on the American Indian. Having studied art at an Indian Cultural Center as a child, she believes that "American Indian culture is the only official American culture."

Her complex and richly textured etchings are reminiscent of metaphysical Indian sand paintings, and many of her titles refer to Native American rituals and ceremonies. But, like American Indian artists, Hansen is not interested in academic imitations. She allows her images to arise spontaneously from her unconscious. In this way, the traditional colors and symbols of the Navajo, Pima, Hopi and other Indian tribes become transformed into a contemporary vision that uses the past to illuminate the present.

As a printmaker, Hansen has experimented with a wide range of techniques and processes. Most recently, she developed an original method of hand-painted, relief prints. Each print thus becomes a unique image with a rare, sculptural elegance. Her etchings are unusually subtle and intimate, with etched, sand-like textures and brilliant touches of vivid primary colors set against the ochres and umbers of the plains and desert. Each print is a delicate composition of geometric shapes with multiple circles and semi-circles, interlocking squares and rectangles, triangles that become arrows and themes which dissolve into increasingly smaller variations of themselves.

While Hansen's prints are strongly influenced by American Indian motifs, similarities to the work of European Modernists such as Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky can also be discerned This influence has become more pronounced in her recent paintings, which stand more completely within the new European traditions of Abstraction and Modernism. In all of Hansen's work, however, her images become gateways to an altered view of reality, a vision of worlds within worlds that remain essentially timeless. See less