Dichtung. Gerecht und wesentlich und direkt
Vielleicht wie in der Vorstellung der ersten Menschen
Gerecht in der Würze des Gartens und unfehlbar in der Zeit.
When Marcia Hafif (born 1929 in Pomona, California, arrived in Rom) in the early 1960s, she found a pulsating vivid art scene there and entered immediately the art circle around Twombly, Kounellis, Uncini ao . She started to paint hard edge pictures, like objects, concrete painting (Now on permanent loan at the FRAC Bourgogne in Dijon and at the MOMCA in Geneva. The gallery owns a wonderful representative painting from this period).
Returning 1971 to New York and finding a studio on Mercer Street, where she is still working till now, she felt the need to orientate her work in a new way. At the age of 43 she started to make fundamental studies and inventory controls of the painting process. Marcia Hafif wrote in 1990: "Once I was actually in NY I soon realized that the painting, that had interested me, was now exhausted, that modern abstract painting might be exhausted as well".
This kind of stock-check, named by the artist Inventory, formulates the basic questions of principles in painting and scrutinizes the media in single chapters. The sensualism of color was named by her for the first time and used as a title for an exhibition in Williamstown, Mass. (curator Thomas Krens) in 1984:
Radical Painting.
Nowadays in an uproarious dominance of young wild paintings the demand for radical painting is unheard. Even or therefore radical painting has supporters among artists and their yearlong lasting experiences are addressed by the term (Marioni, Umberg, Zeniuk, Morales, Mosset, and many more).
When Marcia Hafif painted 12 pictures at her studio in California for this exhibition in spring 2008, a lyric, sunlit melody entered these works. One of the important painters of our time has created a series of paintings that in an easy, not exerting, bright beauty belong to the highest quality of requirement in contemporary painting.
