HARTMUT AUSTEN
untitled, oil on canvas, 60" x 75", 2012

Hartmut Austen was born in Germany and currently resides in Detroit and Iowa City.  He received his Meisterschüler-degree from Hochschule der Künste (University of the Arts) in Berlin and he also studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.  Austen's drawings and paintings have been shown nationally and internationally, and have most recently been exhibited at the Sasaki Associates Gallery in Watertown, MA, Passenger Project Space in Detroit, MI, and Paul Kotula Projects in Ferndale, MI.  In 2009 Austen was awarded a prestigious Kresge Arts in Detroit Fellowship and he is currently the Grant Wood Fellow for Painting and Drawing at the University of Iowa.

"Hartmut Austen's paintings originate from photographic and figurative sources filtered through his personal ideology. While his paintings may be ambiguous and abstract, they are rooted in the authentic, the political, and the real. His archival material of found images: photographs, Xeroxes and clippings — brings legitimacy to his paintings because of the aura/value inherent in an extant image. Therefore, his work occupies two realms: the real world which is archival and architectural and his interior world which is impenetrable and ideological involving the filtering of subjective narrative through abstraction and use of color."

                 -Dick Goody, from the introduction to an interview with Hartmut Austen. In Detroit: Stories, a journal published by the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, 2008.

Hartmut Austen's website