The Grant Wood Art Colony

Grant Wood (1891-1942) helped develop the Stone City Art Colony in Stone City, Iowa, which operated during the summers of 1932 and 1933. The Grant Wood Art Colony, under the direction of the School of Art and Art History at UIowa, honors Wood's belief in the importance of art colonies by offering the Grant Wood Fellowship program and organizing a biennial symposium.

The Daily Palette is celebrating The Grant Wood Art Colony this week by featuring the work of two of its fellows. The Grant Wood Fellowship show, which includes the work of 2012-2013 Fellows Hartmut Austen and Jeremy Lundquist, will be held April 16-21 in the ABW Gallery. A reception for this exhibition will be held on April 19th.

HARTMUT AUSTEN
Wedge, wood construction and paintings, shown at Art X Detroit, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, April 2011

Hartmut Austen is a 2012-2013 Grant Wood Fellow. He was born in Germany and currently resides in Detroit and Iowa City. Austen received his Meisterschüler-degree from Hochschule der Künste in Berlin and he also studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His drawings and paintings have been shown nationally and internationally. In 2009 Austen was awarded a prestigious Kresge Arts in Detroit Fellowship.

"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.

Photo Credit: Tim Thayer

Hartmut Austen's website