Hans Reichel

(1892 – 1958)

It was thanks to the Hans Reichel exhibitions at the Galerie Jeanne Bucher in Paris that Jean Planque came to be acquainted with the work of this artist, a German painter who had been close to Rainer Maria Rilke and Paul Klee in the 1920s. Everything about Reichel’s world – the intimate formats, the avoidance of superficial effects, the poetry generated by an imagination that conceals its means of expression – was bound to appeal to the collector. Reichel draws on his observations of nature for an endless stream of transformations, laws, and connections that enable him to conjure on tiny scraps of paper an infinitely rich inner universe. In watercolors this refined, cultivated painter found a medium particularly well suited to expressing the gentle ebb and flow of his daydreams. The fluidity and transparency create depth, gently rock the viewer’s gaze without putting it to sleep, and support the appearance of small organic realms animated by a tenuous pulse of life through which glide tranquil, brightly colored creatures, birds and fish.