I made my firs appearance at KUNSTBYGNINGEN (The Art Building) in Odense in May 1975 together with the group LYREN. All four of us were former students from the Funen Art Academy.

Mulle Liebmann from the newspaper "Fyns Stiftstidende" wrote:

"There is quite a lot of manners in John Hansens model paintings as well as the portrait paintings' dissolved facial expressions, but also something attractive about the primeval forest-like atmosphere in the most abstracted motives with human bodies, where the figures are just barely seen inside a warm darkness through their movements, which are only suggested as a brush of light over the contour of the body. His small, highly beatifully coloured model studies on paper are also more rythm than body, sensuous, gracefully secure as calligraphic drawings from the East."

Kif wrote in Fyns Tidende:

"John Hansen is perhaps the most experimenting. His so-called portraits are a strive to find human warmth in the colours at the expense of known contours."

In 1986, where known contoursn were still my point of departure, often the torso, I had my third seperate exhibition at "Kunstbygningen". I had just become member of the Association of Visual Arts (BKF) and had worked with both graphics and paintings, still primarily figurative.

Gert Garmund wrote in "Kunstavisen" in feburary 1986:

"John Hansen, a graduate from the Funen Art Academy, works nicely liberated without loosing his grip on the painting as an entirety. His graphics, which are corrosions and etchings, is being further processed until a series of histories occur. One experiences the crispy line, as the tinged surface, from where motives, for example a portrait's pain, meets one with a blackness and worth that only graphics can contain. The space in the surface of the picture encloses the figure, and the viewer is dragged deeper and deeper into the picture. This is also what happens in John Hansens paintings, where the space that can be empty, is compelling to the viewer, so that he is dragged in like the missing figure and is surrounded".