IN MEMORIAM: ANDRÈ DELOAR (†2025)

Artist André Deloar passed away a few days before the HALLENKUNST closing from the consequences of a brain tumor.

We mourn the loss of an outstanding painter who continued to work with impressive clarity and focus until the very end. His works, created during the HALLENKUNST Artist Residency in March and April 2025 on view in our HALLENKUNST exhibition, testify to a profound engagement with architecture, space, and form – and to an artistic vision that reached far beyond the visible.

His paintings depict segments of architecture – reduced, fragmented, and fixed to a defined viewpoint, revealing the pure essence of built form. In expansive acrylic and oil on canvas, he created modern, draft-like portrayals of architectural elements. The resting structures, monolithic and quietly rooted in their surroundings, radiate a sculptural presence.

Deloar worked from real architectural models. From drawings or photographs he developed wooden or cardboard constructions, speculatively completing what remained unseen, and from these he created paintings that condensed architectural fragments into autonomous formal entities. Through shifts in perspective, distance, and segmentation, he released the elements from their functional purpose and moved them into a purely formal realm. Color became his building material – in powerful brushstrokes that assembled planes, edges, and bodies.

His work moves along the boundary between material and meaning, between constructed form and mental architecture. Deloar’s walls, corners, and towers exist as surfaces and bodies without context or human presence – as a quiet, concentrated meditation on the nature of architecture itself.

With his passing, contemporary painting loses a voice of great sensitivity and precision. His works remain as a legacy of an artistic attitude that understood reduction as a path to insight: only through subtraction and silence does architecture become pure geometry – an image of its own idea.

Rest in Peace André Deloar

1975 - 2025