Farbe Licht und Leben

From 1946 to 1951 Hahn studied under Karl Hofer at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste (HfbK) in Berlin and was awarded the city’s art prize for his graphic work as early as 1954. His early works are still under Hofer’s influence. They are testimony to a time still directly permeated by the horrors of the Second World War. Hahn’s world of images at this time is populated by symbolic figures, mixed creatures, sometimes mutilated half-humans or half-animals.
The encounter with the expressionism of the Brücke artists, however, soon gave his painting new impulses, which he was able to transform and combine with his personal style. Reduction and concentration, the two-dimensionality of forms as well as the freedom and finally the power and dynamics of pure color became his defining forms of expression. Stained glass soon proved to be particularly suited to his predilection for expressionist form and color. In the windows he created, Hahn found his very own pictorial language. Here, the motif experiences an even greater intensity and presence through sheer size, but also through the luminosity of the color.