Yvonne Hasan

Critical text

Yvonne Hasan (1925–2016, Bucharest) was a Romanian artist and theoretician, and an important figure within the group of women artists in Romania along with Eva Cerbu, Alma Redlinger, belonging to the Maxy Art School, and Geta Brătescu. Across six decades, her oeuvre spanned multiple media: drawings, collages, paintings, tapestries, installations, films, as well as writings. Since 1964, she incorporated various external elements in her works. These everyday materials, such as personal handbags, gloves, strips of cloth, bedsheets, colored paper, food labels, tinfoil, pieces of furniture or parts of wallpapers are apparently humble but also filled with memories and stories, both personal and universal. Her expressionist and spontaneous compositions depict the world around her, from the vision of the sunbeam shining through a fence to portraits of friends and factory workers. The combination of found materials and figuration of daily life creates a kaleidoscopic documentation of the society in which she lived, discreetly positioning herself against the realist art ideology of the communist era. Since the 1980s she expanded her practice to include tapestries, linking the traditional crafts of Romanian women with expressionism. In the 1990s her works on paper became more and more abstract but always with subtle references to tangible elements.

Text by Balthazar Lovay