Hans Bouman

Hans Bouman (born in 1951) is a Dutch visual artist working in painting, sculpture, etching and video. He settled in Paris in 1980. Hans Bouman grew up in Haarlem, Netherlands, and earned his degrees at the Graphics School and at the Rietveld Academy of Amsterdam in 1978. After settling in Paris in 1980, he received the Painting Prize at the Salon de Montrouge in 1985, when he became a well-known and successful visual artist. Along the years, art critics Alin Avila, Gérard Barrière, Gérard-Georges Lemaire, as well as novelist Daniel Picouly wrote the prefaces to the catalogues of his one-man shows. During his career, Bouman's works have grown in a series of interconnected cycles. His hieratic heads carved in the thickness and density of the layers of paint recalled the Moai of Easter island, the African masks or the dramatic elongations of Expressionnism. « The magic of Bouman lies in the play on pictorial matter and his capacity to make a forceful figure emerge from it, both literally and figuratively" Henri-François Debailleux wrote at the time. In a subsequent series, a whole pantheon of gods and goddesses was born from his imagination: Årantaleph, Olafdir, Kratikoff, Mandi Tan... He has always used photography, for instance in a series dedicated to the bunkers stranded on the beaches of the North Sea. With the development of digital photography, he merged drawing, painting and etching with the many possibilities offered by new technologies. Travelling has always been part and parcel of his artistic approach. During his stays in Bobo-Dioulasso in Burkina Faso and Foumban in Cameroon, together with local traditional bronze casters he created a series of bronze lost-wax sculptures. In 2014, he created a monumental sculpture for the Par't Sino-français in Shunde near Canton, Guangdong, that marked the anniversary of the 50 years of diplomatic relationships between France and China. When he was invited as an artist in residence by the ADEFC created by novelist Ya Ding in 2017 et 2018, Hans Bouman's work took on a new direction, inspired by the astounding landscapes of Guangxi and Hubei provinces.