ABOUT
Bob Hemauer builds paintings the way one might build an argument: in translucent layers, through interval and held silence, with sources drawn from poetry, social science, classical myth, and history. Each painting begins with research and proceeds through layered revision, demonstrating his deep commitment to humanistic inquiry
Working primarily in acrylic on large-scale canvas, he develops color through optical blending rather than physical mixing—pigment laid down in successive transparent passes so that hue and depth emerge from the weight of passing time and accumulated layers. What appears at first as a single field reveals itself, after sustained attention, as a structure of deliberate decisions.
His practice is rooted in the Color Field tradition, and the long American conversation about what a painted surface can hold, but moves against that lineage’s traditional refusal of the figure. He returns figurative presence to the field as deep chromatic forms: Ignacio Sánchez Mejías and the Duende confronting one another across the Ignis diptych, after Federico García Lorca’s Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías. Cassandra is rendered in red, yellow, and orange after Aeschylus and Euripides. The figures, however, do not narrate. They evoke emotion and occupy consciousness, challenging the viewer to construct narrative and meaning in the face of obscurity.
ARTIST BIO
Bob Hemauer is a self-taught abstract painter whose work investigates the ethical, political, and emotional questions universal to the human experience. Informed by literary, historical, and social inquiry, his paintings use layering and interval to generate sustained visual tension and resist narrative closure. His work allows complexity and ambiguity to emerge through the sustained act of observation, challenging the viewer to exist with uncertainty and obscurity in an era that respects neither.
Hemauer lives and works in Madison, Wisconsin. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in History from University of Wisconsin-Madison.
(Photo credit: Andrea Hillsey)