Dennis Hollingsworth

Dan Hug

During this whole visit to Berlin, thoughts of Dan Hug surfaced repeatedly. Dan represents several Berlin artists such as Thomas Zipp and his wife Hanna-Maria Blenke, and Thomas Winkler too.

Dan operates a gallery in Chinatown LA, before that he was located on the corner of Wilshire and Fairfax, then sporting the name "Chicago Project Room". He anticipated the current flow of artists from Chicago to LA by several years.

But it has to be said (hence this particular post) that Dan anticipated this resurgence of NeoExpressionism, a Neo-NeoExpressionism if you will. Going from Jorge Pardo's slick but bland Ikea-Internationalist agenda to the street fighting level of Thomas and Galerie Guido W. Bandach's stable... it seems that there is a revolt against the suave and sophisticated underway... much like the turn of events at the end of the seventies that fueled the TransVanguardia.

And Dan was on it loooooong before anyone else. Talking to him (years ago) about it, I remember being amazed at his depth of knowledge of this young German generation. Dan knows his stuff, and the world should know that he does.

I found images of the work of Thomas' wife Hanah-Marie Blenke:

She was driving us back from dinner one night, and we talked of painting as she attacked the roadway like an Angeleno. She mentioned good painting and I asked her what that was for her. She said: "Strong, direct and honest.", and she said it strongly, directly and honestly.

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I'm thinking too, of the perfect storm of representational/ neoexpressioinist painting in LA. Consider these forces:

-the recent diaspora of Chicago artists for LA and other places (Berlin) Chicago has a solid reputation fo representational art

-the seeming exhaustion of the current post-everything international art fair art

-the tutelage of Roger Herman in UCLA and the formatioin of the Black Dragon Society in Chinatown

-the historical swelling of art schools, every year churning out thousands of artists steeped in fashion/teen angst and the kind of art one makes in a teenager's bedroom

-the extinction of theory and the dearth of new sprouts of art-philosophical dialog in the press at large

Just a thought. More than this, it is an argument coming from certain young artists in LA. What do you think?