Info
Selected works
Artists
From August 28 to September 26, 2026, gallery twenty-six is delighted to present a solo exhibition by Roland Hanak. Bringing together two distinct yet deeply interconnected bodies of work, ROMANTIC GEOMETRIES & A SUBTERRANEAN ZOO explores the fascinating tension between rational structure and vivid imagination across two floors of the gallery space
ROMANTIC GEOMETRIES
On the ground floor of the gallery, paintings in egg tempera and/or acrylic on canvas will be shown under the title ROMANTIC GEOMETRIES. In their design concept, the painter returns to his large-scale beginnings from 2002–2004. The apparent contradiction between romanticism and geometry is made constructive in Hanak’s paintings, akin to Max Frisch’s 1953 comedy Don Juan or The Love of Geometry. Whether they are glowing red-orange-yellow fire or sunset tones bound into vague geometric forms, or geometries in broken colors shifting through pink, light purple, and orange hues: the contrast between these unusual, intense colors and the constructive-geometric, seemingly rationally grounded forms points to the necessity of channeling and substantiating our creative, often emotionally driven impulses into understandable, intersubjectively comprehensible frameworks in order to make them intelligible.
NEO-NEO-GEO
The art movement of Neo-Geometric Conceptualism utilized geometric abstraction, Pop Art, and Minimalism to critically and ironically question consumer society, mass production, and industrialization. Hanak’s Neo-Neo-Geo style takes this play further: it is not about mathematical-geometric perfection, but about the re-humanization of our technically sterile world. In Architecture of Ember, various overlapping polygons attempt to capture an intense palette of ember tones. The title Adrian’s Advice refers to personal advice given to Roland Hanak in 2002 by the Austrian avant-garde artist Marc Adrian (1930–2008), encouraging him to further intensify his depiction of geometries in broken colors due to their absolute singularity.
A SUBTERRANEAN ZOO
In the second part of his exhibition in the basement of Gallery Twenty-Six, Roland Hanak presents another aspect of his oeuvre. In the subterranean zoo, the goal is to map a complex, iridescent world to an idiosyncratic, highly original visual language he developed himself. The flora and fauna motifs originally created for the “Großes Katzenbild” (2008, 200 x 320 cm, egg tempera on canvas) have taken on a life of their own as pictorial themes and reappear in the similarly sized work Court of Siam, among others. Here, culinary herbs, pumpkin blossoms, pomegranates, dragon fruits, star fruits, chestnuts, pineapples, and melon slices turn into narrative visual elements; at times, pure fantasy forms take command, placing us in a magical alchemy of a kitchen. Iridescent fish move through the scenery, illuminated by lemons and oranges. Giraffes, elephants, fire salamanders, sea turtles, or “hippie chickens” enliven the space. The glowing yellow boundary lines—which separate nature from art, the real from the surreal, or simply objects from one another—become a signature of this subterranean basement zoo, which will spread to the public surface for a month.
NEO-ABORIGINAL & POP ART
These nature paintings, which can only superficially be interpreted as such, are distantly related in their iconicity and symbolic visual language to Australian Aboriginal painting, which Roland Hanak experienced as an ultimate artistic epiphany during his trip to Australia in 1999. Animal Dreamings can be found here alongside recurring symbols along narrative songlines. As much as the influence of Aboriginal art symbolism can be detected, the color palette of Roland Hanak’s SUBTERRANEAN ZOO is by no means tied to it; actual natural tones like green or brown will be sought in vain. The primary and secondary colors of this palette, such as orange and violet, are the colors of 1970s hippie culture and the commercial product colors that were first mirrored in Pop Art.
Six Chambers – Flat Pyramids
Roland Hanak
acrylic on canvas
160 x 200 cm (each 80 x 100 cm)
