Tommy Hartung

Tommy Hartung (b. 1979, Akron, OH) currently lives and works in New York. He received his BFA from SUNY Purchase in 2004 and his MFA from the Columbia University in 2006. Hartung’s work was recently featured over the last two years in a major solo exhibition at the Rose Art Museum in Waltham, MA and in the 2017 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

Exploring the didactic potential of the moving image, Tommy Hartung’s videos analyze the creation and dissemination of cultural narratives through entertainment. Often taking the major themes of modernism as his subject matter, his work has addressed colonial expansion and exploration, evolution, conquest, and innovation. Drawing upon a diverse range of sources, including BBC documentaries, Anna Karenina, the Gnostic gospels, and the 1967 classic coming-of-age novel The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton, Hartung experiments with the history of film and video and the conventions of narrative, fragmenting and deconstructing his source material.

His recent hour-long video work, THE BIBLE, was featured in subsequent presentations at the Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht (2015, the Netherlands), the Rose Art Museum (2015, Waltham), and ‘Hammer Projects: This Is the End’, Hammer Museum (2015, Los Angeles). Other recent presentations include ‘Tommy Hartung’, Braverman Gallery (2013, Tel Aviv), ‘Utopia Parkway’, Xavier Hufkens (2013, Brussels) ‘Tommy Hartung & Uri Aran’, White Flag Projects (2012, St. Louis), ‘Anna’, On Stellar Rays (2011, New York), ‘Greater New York’, MoMA/PS1 (2010, Queens), ‘Reconstruction #1’, On Stellar Rays (2010 New York), ‘Impossible Vacation’, White Flag Projects (2010, St Louis), ‘The Ascent of Man’, On Stellar Rays (2009, New York), ‘The Pipe and the Flow, Galería Espacio Mínimo’ (2009, Madrid), ‘SCREEN’, 8 Seymor Place (2009, London) ‘Queens International 4’, Queens Museum of Art (2008, Queens), Moti Hasson Gallery (2008, New York), ‘Gresham’s Ghost’ (2008, New York), ‘White Box’ (2007, New York), and screenings at The Rotterdam Film Festival (2011), Anthology Film Archives, New York (2008), CRG Gallery, New York (2007), and Elizabeth Dee Gallery, New York (2007).

His work is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY), the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY), the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles, CA), the Rose Art Museum (Waltham, MA), and the Dimitris Daskalopoulos Art Collection (Athens, Greece).