Trained as an agronomist engineer, Hanns Schimansky decided from 1979 to devote his career to art and more particularly to drawing. His drawings, written as much as drawn, attempt to capture and extend the present moment, to mirror the rhythm of the universe. Using and provoking the idea of chance, he metaphorically slows the headlong speed at which we live in today's world, dominated as it is by the media. Geometric shapes and intercrossing, looping lines, accentuated by the folds in the paper he uses, form Schimansky's unmistakeable energetic graphic style. It is as if the drawing was sculpted by the thickness of the stroke, the choice of the paper, the way it is folded over on itself. The artist rolls up, twists, pushes down with the point of the pencil, he energetically sculpts the paper. Schimansky's works are full of movement, dizzying, just like waves or gusts of wind, like sung landscapes.

« By holding the instrument at an acute angle to the surface in order to make downward moving lines or rolling the drawing tool to make a twisting, rough-edged line, Schimansky undermines the more familiar, fluid movement of a pencil or paint stick across the paper. (...) In some drawings, it's as if different abstract, hieroglyphs have invaded each other's territory, forming a new hybrid language ». John Yau.

Extract from the catalogue published by the Gallery Jaeger Bucher on the occasion of the solo show entitled « La Ligne Claire » of Hanns Schimansky (May 29 - September 25, 2010).