Werner Hartmann (1945 - 1993)

Werner Hartmann

Werner Hartmann is a Swiss painter and graphic artist.

Hartmann studied painting at art academies in Oslo and The Hague. In the 1960s he began with large-format, tachyistic, partly monochrome oil paintings. Until the mid-1970s, they contain reminders of landscape. But then hieroglyphs gradually emerge from thick layers of paint, at first still readable as letters, then increasingly abstract and simple in form.

Hartmann increasingly resorted to purely graphic means, which is how his laconic pictorial language of pictograms emerged. He uses, for example, pieces of wood and covers them with his signs, turning them into objects that resemble cultural relics. The signs are also drawn with black ink on paper and linen. While some works have a horizontal structure, like written texts, and one can notice paragraphs in them, others form a single continuous picture of signs, among which the stylized images of fish and the wheel are repeated.