THE SIT DOWN
15: DAVID HANES
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.
PF: Who or what has influenced your work the most?
I suppose something like the energetics of the living world. The way a forest actually vibrates when you're standing in it, the specific quality of light in a particular place at a particular hour, how that changes as you stand there. I am trying to engage with a moment of vitality, the feeling that the world is staring back. Van Gogh understood this better than almost anyone: the mark is how you electrocute the looking.
I grew up in Toronto, a city that no longer resembles the place I was born into. I've spent most of my adult life nomadic, between Berlin and various parts of Europe, far from anything that should feel like home. That restlessness is in the work.
In terms of painters: Munch and Franz Marc for colour as emotional necessity. Some of the Group of Seven for the conviction that engaging modern cultural forces through nature is serious work. Sky Glabush for helping me find my footing in landscape painting. Lois Dodd for the radical honesty of just looking at what's there.
I grew up in Toronto, a city that no longer resembles the place I was born into. I've spent most of my adult life nomadic, between Berlin and various parts of Europe, far from anything that should feel like home. That restlessness is in the work.
In terms of painters: Munch and Franz Marc for colour as emotional necessity. Some of the Group of Seven for the conviction that engaging modern cultural forces through nature is serious work. Sky Glabush for helping me find my footing in landscape painting. Lois Dodd for the radical honesty of just looking at what's there.
PF: Walk us through your creative process?
It starts outside. I make small hand-held sketches on site, everything fits in my hands at once: the backing board, the paper, the pastels, the box. That physical constraint matters. What gets made is limited by what the body can hold and what the moment allows.
I carry those sketches sometimes for years. Back in the studio, I pin them up and live with them, sometimes for months, before anything becomes a painting. During these reflective moments I am building stretchers, priming and sanding canvas, preparing the work like I'm toiling the soil. When I finally start, I work in oil on canvas, building the painting up through weeks of layering: typically with glazes over glazes, wet into wet, dry over dry, marks dissolved and rebuilt, colour arrived at rather than planned. The palette on the table becomes a living thing, producing colours I couldn't have mixed deliberately. It's an alchemy.
The painting is finished when it starts talking back. When I can't make another move without breaking something that's already working. This kind of sticky cohesion.
I carry those sketches sometimes for years. Back in the studio, I pin them up and live with them, sometimes for months, before anything becomes a painting. During these reflective moments I am building stretchers, priming and sanding canvas, preparing the work like I'm toiling the soil. When I finally start, I work in oil on canvas, building the painting up through weeks of layering: typically with glazes over glazes, wet into wet, dry over dry, marks dissolved and rebuilt, colour arrived at rather than planned. The palette on the table becomes a living thing, producing colours I couldn't have mixed deliberately. It's an alchemy.
The painting is finished when it starts talking back. When I can't make another move without breaking something that's already working. This kind of sticky cohesion.
PF: What do you want people to feel or take away from your art?
A kind of pause. Or, not pause exactly. More like a charge. A silent charge. A slice of the living world held still long enough to stare back at you. My paintings ask you to stare rather than glance. If someone stands in front of one longer than they expected, and leaves feeling the ordinary world has become slightly more electric, that's the exchange working.
PF: If you could have dinner with any artist who would it be?
Today, I would say Andrew Cranston, Stanley Whitney, or Sturgill Simpson, and I genuinely can't decide between them. Cranston for what it feels like to hold silence and solitude inside a painting without sentimentalising either, we've talked about this directly and I'd want more of that conversation. Whitney for how he found a language so completely his own that colour became structure. Simpson for proving that depth and reach aren't opposites, that you can go completely inward and come out the other side with something that moves a lot of people. I'd want to know from all three how they learned to trust the thing they were actually doing rather than the thing they thought they should be doing. I love to talk about the organic process of following ones work, always following the work. For better or worse.