Anton Haardt has been a collector of Folk/Outsider art for more than twenty-five years, first starting her collection with Mose Tolliver in the early 1970s. Her gallery of self- taught artists in New Orleans, Louisiana houses over 2,000 pieces of Self-Taught Artists works.
Haardt received her BFA from San Francisco Art Institute in 1971 and besides her gallery of paintings by self-taught artists, she is a painter , photographer and also a writer recently completing two manuscripts soon to be published:Mose Tolliver from A to Z and another called Run Toward the Sun, about the Alabama sculptor,Juanita Rogers..
In your observations of the artwork and writings of Anton Haardt, you might be struck by the irony and the ecstasy of a peasant woman carrying a perfectly iced white wedding cake...on her head; or you might get caught on a crowded zocolo in a rubber plantation boomtown on market day; or you may sense the weight and smell of a decapitated pigs head happily being held by a small boy....
Haardt exercises a visual scrutiny of existence through the dissection of detail, inspired by her childhood and through extensive travel. This, she filtered through a sharp and uncanny vision that usually is the stuff only of our dreams
Haardt takes a labored yet loving look at a sort of post-modern pentimento: in her work for example, she may mediate the meaning of "modern" as defined in the closing decades of the century and the closing centuries of the millennium. The role of women, always lurking in a metaphorical corner of Haardts work, is another example of her obsession with a more accurate presentation of reality. Whether it be in the form of the hand, flower or iron as icon, or the themes of ticking time or the domestic role of a woman whose toil would otherwise have been overlooked, or worse, ignored; all is brought into focus by the visual acuteness and poetic vision beat out so beautifully by Anton Haardt:
Artist Highlights
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ArtWanted.com Gallery: Art/Drawing Misc.
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Past Clients: House of Blues,Blount Collection
