About:

Born and educated in Germany, Hans Gerhard first came to the US as an exchange student for "just one year", but returned to teach at American Universities, and has lived in the US since 1958. For many years, he considered himself a recreational painter of landscapes, and occasional carver of wooden objects, sometimes recognizable as birds,mammals,or fish. Since moving to Hughes River Farm in Rappahannock County in 1987, and encouraged by kindred spirits among the Rappahannock arts and craft community, he has turned to working with scrap iron and steel to create sometimes bizarre,usually rusty, and occasionally whimsical sculptures. In this genre he follows ideas derived from folk art and richly developed by masters of modernist art in different countries. His paintings,meanwhile, have left the realm of observed "reality" and turned emphatically abstract: creating their own reality, leaving the viewers to reach into their own imagination.

Gerhard's work was first publically shown by the late venerable Washington,D.C. Arts Dealer Franz Bader during the 1970ies, and, more recently, in Virginia galleries. His paintings and sculptures have been acquired by public and private collections in the United States and Europe.