Hanns Schimansky was born in 1949 in Bitterfeld, Germany.
He is a member of the Berlin Academy of Arts and in 1998 he was appointed Professor at the Art College Berlin-Weissensee.
Hanns Schimansky was born in East Germany and began by studying Agronomy. It was during this period, as an agronomist in an agricultural cooperative, that he began to draw landscapes and portraits. This figurative beginning laid the foundation for his entire body of work. The decision to work in pencil and India ink was motivated by the scarcity of materials available in rural East Germany and the lack of personal affinity with paint and canvas. In her desire to capture the passing moment, the artist became impatient with the complex and time-consuming nature of painting.
Throughout the years, Hanns Schimansky has been patiently developing an original form of visual poetics that stems from a strong ethical stance: a deliberate choice to make drawing his exclusive practice.
His work is divided technically and stylistically into three distinct groups: graphite pencil drawings on prepared, folded paper in which vibrant colour emerges as a structural element, and Indian ink drawings made with a nib pen. These ‘visual melodies’ have inspired several generations of new artists and collectors.
Given the limits of a blank sheet of paper, often prepared and usually folded vertically and horizontally, the first step is to select the material to suit the type of surface: acrylic paint or ink applied with a brush or a metal nib, pencil or pastel, to mention only those that Schimansky most frequently uses.
Our eyes can follow exploratory lines that move and spread like rhizomes across the surface of the paper. In some cases, we can virtually hear the sound of this visual-acoustic line, the result of a metal nib filled with ink moving across a more or less rough surface. The drawing/musical score is created by the marks left as the line continues its way through breaks and interruptions.
Hanns Schimansky has shown his work at the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague, Holland, the Staatlich Kunstalle in Karlsruhe, Germany, the Museu d’art et d’histoire in Neuchâtel, Switzerland and at the Martin-Gropious-Bau and Akademie der Künste in Berlin, Germany. His work is represented in public collections such as the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Oslo, the Berlinische Gallery, the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Berlin, the Pinakothek der Modern in Munich and the Morgan Library & Museum Collection in New York. In early 2020, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York presents a drawing by Hanns Schimansky in their exhibition From Géricault to Rockburne: Selections from the Michael and Juliet van Vliet Rubenstein Gift.
Hanns Schimansky lives and works in Berlin.