Duncan Hannah: On Paper

Kasmin is pleased to present a solo exhibition of work by American artist Duncan Hannah (1952–2022) from the collection of the artist’s estate. Duncan Hannah: On Paper will feature not just drawings and collages but paintings of collages, book covers and magazines, foregrounding Hannah’s uniquely personal relationship to paper as subject, substrate, and influence in his practice over several decades.

Throughout his career and life, Hannah had a close relationship with paper. An avid reader from an early age, he devoured entire adventure series such as Tarzan, The Rover Boys, Sherlock Holmes, and Fu Man Chu, quickly moving onto a huge and eclectic variety of writers. Hannah began keeping journals as a teenager which were as much scrapbooks as writing. Filled with images cut out from magazines of contemporary and period film, music and literature, plus rock concert stubs, candy wrappers, Victorian erotica, ink doodles and an impressive gift for rendering art deco typography, these journals were a prototype of the paintings on show in this exhibition.

It was perhaps inevitable that collages became an important outlet for Hannah. Influenced by Kurt Schwitters and Peter Blake, he kept extensive boxes of paper and ephemera organized by color and texture. Hannah once stated, “Collages, by necessity, are very quick, and you can change them so quickly. Cut it up and, since you are using found color, it’s very liberating and so wide open. It suits my magpie nature.” From 2013–15, Hannah made a series of oil paintings based on already-created collages. Verging on trompe l’oeil, he painted corrugated cards, erotic photographs, Penguin book covers, gingham wrapping paper and anything else that had caught his magpie’s eye. The exhibition will notably pair the collage Red Cross (1978) with an oil painting realized 35 years later, Red Cross (2013), on view together for the first time.

Included also are collages and drawings of latter day film stars and models, as well as a self-portrait from 1996. Also on show is Hannah’s last finished painting, which is in itself a form of self-portrait. It shows one of his favorite English actresses, Susannah York, then a teenager, seated with a book open on her lap, playing records. In this portrait we see Hannah joining all the dots between books, music, cinema and art.