SD - DH — Parallel Form

THE SIT DOWN
15: DAVID HANES

Of all the mediums he experimented with, David Hanes (b. 1987, Toronto) came to painting last, and reluctantly. Photography came first, followed by sculpture, performance, and a BFA in Sculpture at OCAD University in Toronto, with a formative year at the Kansas City Art Institute along the way. He grew up around painters, his mother among them, and his brother is a well-known graffiti artist in Canada. He moved within that community and the DIY scenes of Toronto, surrounded by people whose relationship to mark-making was urgent, unauthorised, and entirely their own. He admired their skill and conviction too deeply to follow them. Instead, he searched for a different path. The fact that it eventually led him back to painting is perhaps where the edge in the work comes from.

A move to Berlin in 2014 — with neither contacts nor German — began as an extension of the digital and conceptual practice he'd developed in Canada, and became something much larger. He showed with Open Forum in Berlin and Spazio ORR in Brescia, worked through an intensely experimental period of found objects and situational sculpture, and increasingly felt he couldn't find a home in any of it. Drawing and painting had been running quietly in the background the whole time. With the encouragement of two mentors — Sky Glabush in Canada and Mark Emblem in Berlin — he finally let them come forward.

The shift coincided with a deeper one. Berlin had taken Hanes to the edge of himself, and the decision to get sober marked the beginning of a slow, ongoing transformation that the paintings both record and enact. Where the earlier work came from a critical, negative space, the new work is deliberately generative — an exchange between himself and his experience of the world, built on connection rather than critique. A 2022 show at Mott Projects in New York was the first public glimpse of this direction, and it has been gathering momentum since, through residencies from Iceland to Tuscany and a presentation on David Zwirner's Platform.

The paintings begin as plein-air sketches made on his travels, then translated into oil, a medium whose slowness he values precisely because it makes time strange. Colour is the driving force, mark the second instrument, and together they generate what he thinks of as a haptic charge: paintings that meet somewhere between the spontaneous moment and something contemplative and considered. They can be beautiful and slightly spooky at once, approachable on the surface with something stranger underneath, and doubt is one of their flavours. He sees his work as a kind of marriage between the German Expressionists — Franz Marc, Kirchner, Munch — and the Canadian landscape tradition of the Group of Seven, with the Nabis somewhere in the mix, all drawn to that post-Impressionist moment when painting was moving from the past into the modern world.

He works on many paintings at once, often returning to a single motif across formats. His drawings, though, stay private. He believes every artist needs a part of their practice that exists only for themselves, a way of speaking without words, and the drawings are his.

Now based in London after completing his MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art, Hanes has an upcoming solo exhibition with Pulpo Gallery in Murnau — fittingly, the town of Gabriele Münter and the Blaue Reiter. For an artist whose work is ultimately about connection — to each other, to the viewer, to the story — painting is less a way of solving the world than of staying in relationship with it. It slowed him down, opened him up, and, by his own account, saved his life.