Dieter Hall: A Naked Chair

Dieter Hall portrays man thrown back on himself. Ecce Homo, behold the man—without his social attributes, often nude, in splendid isolation. Hall seeks the common denominator—metonymically called the Naked Chair—of mere existence in the images of others’ (mostly male) bodies. He regards things, objects, gardens and landscapes with the same searching gaze. His minutely arranged still lifes—a glass, a flower, a chair – call to mind Bonnard and Matisse. Hall’s bare chairs are recurrent silent echoes of isolation and transience, intensified by the dark shadow the AIDS epidemic cast on his life and work while living in New York. Although his works are not referential in the traditional sense, Hall reacts to the works of other artists, including painter Alice Neel’s psychological realism and the work of photographers like David Armstrong and Peter Hujar. Hall was friends with Hujar and moved in the same scene—until the latter’s early death from AIDS. Photography plays a key part in Hall’s work — though never as an end in itself: it helps him compose his pictures. He selects details—a foot or a hand, for example—and transposes them into painterly renditions, wholly reinventing the subject portrayed in the process. The resulting works, characterized above all by their radical intimacy, tell of isolation and a deep-seated need for connection.