Hans Hansen - Creative curiosity drove Hansen to photography
Born in Bielefeld in 1940, Hans Hansen came to photography as an autodidact, but had previously trained as a lithographer at the Thomas & Kurzberg printing company and studied applied graphics under Walter Breker at the Düsseldorf Art Academy in the late 1950s. During this time, he developed a keen interest in the combination of photography and graphics – a medium which was already common practice in the US advertising industry, but in Germany was almost entirely avoided. To satisfy his curiosity, Hans Hansen simply began taking his own photographs, and found competent partners in his fellow students Bernd Becher and Hilla Becher, who also guided him in the darkroom. At the start of his photographic career in 1962, he produced studies of glass objects for the Finnish designer Tapio Wirkkala, followed shortly afterwards by commissions for renowned companies such as Lufthansa, Mercedes, Kodak and Volkswagen, whose brand image he decisively characterised through his deliberately reduced and clear visual language.
A new aesthetic in product and object photography
Hans Hansen was not originally interested in venturing into advertising, but his acquaintance and several conversations with Jack Piccolo - an art director at the DDB agency in New York - helped to overcome his reservations. He photographed for Lufthansa and its advertising manager Hans G. Conrad for decades, and they even adopted his special style for their in-flight menus. In 1970, however, Hansen founded his own studio specialising in subject photography, for which the artist concentrated entirely on the form of the object depicted, detaching it from all references and staging it in sober exclusivity in front of perfectly lit monochrome backgrounds. In his visual language, Hansen consciously referred to the traditions of the Bauhaus and the Ulm School of Design, where, in his view, the artists' personal attitude was placed at the forefront rather than following fashions.
Personal interpretation despite all sobriety
Hans Hansen also photographed reportages for various magazines such as Zeit Magazin, the magazine of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, Architektur & Wohnen and Max, and for many years photographed staged meals for a series in Stern magazine. In the 1980s, however, he also increasingly turned to artistic projects. The German photographer and gallery owner Franz Christian Gundlach credited Hansen with creating a new visual language and gaining new perspectives through dissolution and abstraction. Through the sober style in which Hansen had photographed chairs and other products for the Swiss company Vitra over the years, he achieved a new documentary form of comparability, which was, however, of secondary importance to him: Hansen was expressly concerned with his personal interpretation of the photographed objects. Hans Hansen received prizes and awards for his photographic work, including the Karl Schneider Prize of the City of Hamburg in 1997.
In 2021, at the end of his impressive career, Hans Hansen donated his entire life's work, including around 10,000 slides, prints, letters and other documents, to the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg.
Hans Hansen - Works that have already been sold at Kunsthaus Lempertz:
