Contemporary responses to the work of Simon Hantaï by Andy Harper, Marjorie Welish, Joe Fyfe, Amélie De Beauffort and Stuart Elliot

The Journal of Contemporary Painting invited five contemporary artists to reflect on the work of Simon Hantaï. Reflections by British artists, Stuart Elliot and Andy Harper; Belgian artist, Amelie de Beauffort; and American artists, Joe Fyfe and Marjorie Welish, are collected here. Each artist wrote from a different proximity to the work of Simon Hantaï – through seeing the work in recent exhibitions or catalogues – but always grounded by engagements with their own studio practices. A brief introduction by Laura Lisbon offers a glimpse at one of the many provocations that Hantaï’s work offers through viewing in person the major retrospective exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, in 2013. The viewing of the exhibition acted as the initial prompt to invite contemporary artists to reflect on Simon Hantaï at this point in time. The artists’ reflections collected here explore insights into the aleatory, temporal, topological and historical dimensions of Hantaï’s work.