David Hanes

David Hanes (b. 1987, Toronto) is a Canadian/American
artist based between London and Berlin.
“Painting is my exchange with a vital and restless world.”
His work begins outdoors with hand-held observational
sketches made on site from his travels: imprints of light,
colour, atmosphere, and energy. He carries these sometimes
for years, filtering them through distance and time before
transforming them in the studio into colour-driven oil
paintings. Shelters, horizons, forests and skies — motifs he
keeps returning to, not out of nostalgia, but out of concern.
In this way, the paintings are not reproductions but
recollections of marks, rhythms, moods, and the pause
between then and now.
Through devoted looking and patient making, painting is
how he inhabits time, sitting with the world long enough
for something to declare itself. The ordinary becomes
electric. The still begins to move. Working across intimate
and large formats, his paintings are dwelling-places that
hold a felt weight of being alive: grief and hope, loss and
longing, suffering and curiosity. All existing together.

His work carries an awareness of early Expressionist groups
such as Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter, the Group of
Seven's relationship to the Canadian landscape, and a
lineage of colour-driven painters from Munch and Seurat
through to contemporaries such as Daniel Richter, Lois
Dodd, and Andrew Cranston.