With this exhibition of early works by Hal Busse (1926-2018), Beck & Eggeling Gallery is pleased to present an artist whose work and its significance in the context of German post-war art has just begun to receive broader attention within art historical considerations in recent years. The focus on the late 1950s not only highlights a very productive and crucially creative period in Busse's artistic development. It’s also the time when Busse was in closer contact with the ZERO group and in 1958 took part in the legendary "7th Evening Exhibition – Das Rote Bild/The Red Picture" at the studio of Mack and Piene on Gladbacher Straße in Düsseldorf.

Busse sent two red works to the exhibition, one of them a nail-relief, that’s as far as we know today. Whether or not these works are on view in our exhibition is impossible to find out. What the artist associated with ZERO, however, is almost self-evident: Mack's dynamic structures, Piene's grid patterns, Uecker's nails. Busse found very similar answers to formal-aesthetic questions. This simultaneity in the development of artistic strategies proves Busse's connection to the discourses of that time. In Stuttgart, where she lived with her husband, the painter Klaus Bendixen, she was part of a network of visual artists and intellectuals from other disciplines in which trends in art, literature and philosophy were discussed and through which contact with ZERO was ultimately made. In the 1950s, she was able to study European modernism at close quarters during several stays in Paris. The young artist was particularly impressed by Fernand Léger's treatment of forms. In the 1950s, she created paintings with groups of figures, at first still strongly influenced by Léger, whose form she began to dissolve more and more as time went on. Her interest shifted away from the figures themselves to their groupings, away from the individual to the mass. In this process, the figures finally dissolved into dots, patterns, streaks or even nails. In contrast to the ZERO artists, who developed abstraction more from a technical and formal point of view, Busse derived non-figurativeness from thefig...

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Busse sent two red works to the exhibition, one of them a nail-relief, that’s as far as we know today. Whether or not these works are on view in our exhibition is impossible to find out. What the artist associated with ZERO, however, is almost self-evident: Mack's dynamic structures, Piene's grid patterns, Uecker's nails. Busse found very similar answers to formal-aesthetic questions. This simultaneity in the development of artistic strategies proves Busse's connection to the discourses of that time. In Stuttgart, where she lived with her husband, the painter Klaus Bendixen, she was part of a network of visual artists and intellectuals from other disciplines in which trends in art, literature and philosophy were discussed and through which contact with ZERO was ultimately made. In the 1950s, she was able to study European modernism at close quarters during several stays in Paris. The young artist was particularly impressed by Fernand Léger's treatment of forms. In the 1950s, she created paintings with groups of figures, at first still strongly influenced by Léger, whose form she began to dissolve more and more as time went on. Her interest shifted away from the figures themselves to their groupings, away from the individual to the mass. In this process, the figures finally dissolved into dots, patterns, streaks or even nails. In contrast to the ZERO artists, who developed abstraction more from a technical and formal point of view, Busse derived non-figurativeness from the figure itself and never completely abandoned representation (although many paintings remained untitled, this is evidenced by a few titled abstract works such as 'Bathers', 'Arena' or 'St Mark's Square'). The common interest, however, layed in reduction of figuration in favor of color and structure and the new possibilities of perceiving certain phenomena that were developed with them.

In the broader context of ZERO, Busse's work was presented in group exhibitions in the late 1950s and early 1960s in galleries and institutions. In addition, however, she was also featured in numerous other important exhibitions of contemporary art throughout Germany during these years. On the one hand, this was also because she devoted her artistic interest and curiosity to other tendencies at the same time, for example concrete-constructive art, as some of the exhibited works also show. On the other hand, Hal Busse was an artist who was perceived at eye level in the context of the entire German avant-garde, respected and much shown.

The circumstances and conditions under which such a career suddenly stagnates, finally fades away and falls into oblivion can be read in Hal Busse's biography as exemplary for many stories of women artists of her generation. Social and economic structures that made it unequally difficult for women, and especially mothers, to pursue their own careers. An evolving art market that preferred an established personal style to a wide-ranging artistic output that was in constant flux. An art world organized on the whole in hierarchical-patriarchal thought structures in which success equaled quality above anything else. The reasons are manifold. The fact that these circumstances and preconditions for artistic production are now included in the consideration and evaluation of an artistic oeuvre not only enables rediscoveries (and thus the recognition of artistic achievement), they also enable a more complete picture of our cultural history.