JM Haessle “New Works”

Mizuma & Kips

[Image: JM Haessle "Memories" (2020) oil on canvas 60 x 40 in ]

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Jean-Marie Haessle has been working in New York since 1967, and quickly emerged as a distinctive voice amid the cerebral formalism of the American Modernists. Haessle’s appreciation for Color Field composition found affective scaffolding in his full-bodied, lyrical approach to paint, melding romanticism with an expository rigor as yet untapped by his contemporaries. Never a slave to style, Haessle has explored the communicative possibilities of gesture in many iterations over the course of his career, from his ‘70’s geometric abstractions to the lush acrylic amalgams we encounter in his most recent work. Throughout the evolution of his practice, Haessle’s investment in constructing edgeless, emotional pastorals through mark-making has remained steadfast; his instinctive interventions, whether patterned or free-form, achieve harmony in agglomeration, creating thresholds through chromatically anchored deployments of frenzy. In turns meditative and defiant, Haessle’s iconic paintings are love letters to the medium itself, balancing the mythology of fine art with it’s spell-binding ability to box with the sublime.

Haessle was born in 1939 in Alsace, France. During an adolescent bout of illness, he discovered a book of paintings by Van Gogh, and resolved to become an artist. Following a stint in the military, he spent some time in Paris before moving to New York City, where he is still based today. Haessle has shown in high-profile venues all over the world, including the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Ridgefield, Connecticut, the Korea University Art Museum in Seoul, Korea, The Taiwan Museum in Taipei, Gallery One in Tokyo, Japan, the Busan Museum of Art in Korea, Galerie Jade in Colmar, France, and Kips Gallery in New York City. His work has been profiled by critics Jonathan Goodman, Robert C. Morgan, and Bernard Zurcher.