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Eckart Hahn

Der schwarze Hund trägt bunt

Ein einzigartiges Bilduniversum

Eckart Hahn (b. Freiburg, 1971; lives and works in Stuttgart) creates paintings that combine technical perfection worthy of the Old Masters with a Surrealist flair. He likes to listen to literature as he works, and what he hears often inspires his work. In “Zwei Herren am Strand,” a novel by the Austrian writer Michael Köhlmeier, Winston Churchill and Charlie Chaplin chat about their struggles with depression, for which they sometimes use the phrase “the black dog.” So Eckart Hahn’s dog in colorful attire is in a sense wearing camouflage, but in the artist’s self-conception, the animal also figures as an emblem of variety, complexity, and subtle ambiguity. In other words, “Nothing is as it seems, and nothing seems as it is.” Fifty-five artists from diverse disciplines, including Judith Hermann, Charly Hübner, Karoline Schuch, Will Chancellor, Katja Riemann, Roman Signer, Mieze Katz, Yves Netzhammer, Silke Burmester, Manfred Peckl, and Gerhard Polt, now explore the implications of that motto by pondering Hahn’s paintings and subjecting them to an “aesthetic assimilation.” Among the fruits of their musings: a recipe by a master chef, a short composition by the professor of music, anecdotes, stories, and poems by acclaimed creative minds.

Published in conjunction with a traveling exhibition, the book features fifty-five reflections as well as two introductory essays by Marco Hompes and Wolfgang Ullrich.