'Woman in Blue' by Hans Lauer, 1965, Nuremberg, Nahuel Huapi Region, Argentina

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Signed lower right, 'H. Lauer' for Hans Lauer (Argentine-German, 1902-1989) and dated 1965.

Hans Lauer emerges as a sympathetic chronicler … Read more Signed lower right, 'H. Lauer' for Hans Lauer (Argentine-German, 1902-1989) and dated 1965.

Hans Lauer emerges as a sympathetic chronicler of Patagonian light, a German-born landscapist who made Argentina his country and Bariloche his enduring motif. Born in Nuremberg in 1902, he emigrated to Argentina in 1920 and fixed his practice in the Nahuel Huapi region, painting the blue-white atmospheres of the lake basin and the sheltering stands of native forest with a direct, self-taught hand; he remained rooted there until his death in Bariloche in 1989. Contemporary reports place him working across northern Patagonia—San Martín de los Andes among his circuits—where he translated the temperate Andean palette into sober oils and watercolors keyed to weather and season rather than to metropolitan fashions. Autodidact by formation, he belongs to that émigré cohort who stitched European discipline to local terrain, and by the 1950s–60s his production reflects an assured, observational plein-air habit that privileges structure over effect. While Bariloche provided the studio and the subject, his name also circulates in Buenos Aires contexts through collectors and dealers who sought Patagonian views during the mid-century tourism boom, an afterlife that helped keep his vistas in the market even as he remained geographically anchored to the south. Within the regional history of Argentine painting he stands as a persistent eye on Nahuel Huapi and the forests of Los Alerces, a painter who made place his method and left a cohesive body of work mapping the Andean lake district’s changing weather and light. See less