Michelle Thomas Fine Art: Hardy Hanson – In the Spring (opening reception)

We invite you to the opening reception for Hardy Hanson: In the Spring on Friday, January 23, 5-7p.

Hardy Hanson worked passionately and prolifically for 55 years, painting, sculpting, printmaking, and teaching, generally at the same time. He found a positive synergism in working across disciplines, all at once, and pieces often took years to complete. This “grasshopper” approach allowed for one medium to influence another, resolving artistic dilemmas.

During the 1970s, Hanson composed detailed sculptural compositions of unorthodox materials. Small yet powerful, these sculptures produce simultaneous sensations of fascination and aversion in an uneasy tension. Hanson said he chose “micro elements to address macro themes,” manipulating order to reveal the underlying chaos and darkness of human nature.

Towards the end of his life, Hanson probed more existential questions, his focus shifting from the world around him to the world within. His lifelong interest in the interactions between fragments of painted color culminated in the Meditations series of paintings, in which dense drifts of pointillist dots create illusory volumes of light and space, a visual ebb and flow expressing our mysterious connection with the infinite cosmos.

On view through March 31, 2026