HANNES POSTMA
(Dutch, b. 1933)
Hannes Postma
built a reputation in Europe in the 1960s with especially his etching and
aquatints and lithography. Postma was fascinated with children’s drawings and
interested in spontaneous experimentation. The figurative expressionist work
inhabited with floating, entangled, bulky figures seemed related to the CoBrA
legacy in The Netherlands, and Postma admired CoBrA artists such as Karel Appel
and Lucebert as well as Art Brut artist Jean Dubuffet. Postma never belonged to
or associated with the CoBrA movement or its members, though, and denies being
influenced by them. His later paintings had strong Surrealist, architectural
and constructivist tendencies. Postma’s work is in New York’s Museum of Modern
Art, the Pasadena (Calif.) Norton Simon Museum, the National Gallery of Canada
in Ottawa, Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum, Museum Boymans van Beuningen in
Rotterdam, the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem, the Netherlands, the Modern Art
Museum and National Museum in Stockholm, Sweden, the Modern Art Museum in
Malmö, Sweden, the Kunsthalle in Hamburg, Germany, and many other museums
across Europe. His 1999 career retrospective was at Arnhem’s Museum voor
Moderne Kunst and the Dordrecht’s Museum, both in The Netherlands.
