Omar Hassan. Breaking Through Black #19 “Tempesta”, 2020

The exhibition will open at second at Bermel von Luxburg, in the occasion of Berlin’s Gallery Weekend, and will present a selection of works from  Hassan’s series BREAKING THROUGH and INJECTIONS.

«We start with color,» wrote Rothko once, and Omar Hassan follows him, but adding the physical action on top of the color. Through the effort of repeatedly pulling together his own body in order to control his movements to use them as a proper painting tool, Omar makes of physical action the generating source of his work, either when he punches the canvas, or even when he patiently sits and hand-paints thousands of spray caps to create his unconventional city’s maps.

In his series BREAKING THROUGH using his boxing skills to create art, Hassan surely mixes control with chance, following Pollock’s approach: control of the body movements and choice of the color palette, versus the fortuitous spread and dropping of the color while hitting the canvas. The action becomes art itself, supporting Harold Rosenberg’s opinion on Abstract Expressionism, where the Action Painters by having a dramatic, personal, and physical confrontation with the canvas, provided a compelling image of their creative process and achieved an authentic expression of individuality and humanity while being liberated from the conventional standards of beauty.

The 15,000 caps used to create a Map of Berlin’s districts, presented at Luisa Catucci Gallery, are hand-painted singularly in order to create an accurate city plan. They cannot be painted as freely as the boxing pieces, and neither as Hassan’s INJECTIONS series, where the uncontrolled drop of excessive spray paint on a single point becomes the main subject of the work.