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Indepth Arts News:
"Alexis Harding: New Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture"
2003-10-08 until 2003-11-08
Andrew Mummery Gallery
London, ,
UK United Kingdom
The Andrew Mummery Gallery is pleased to present a new body of work by Alexis Harding. Harding's paintings emphasise their own inescapable materiality through playful chemistry and a vertiginous sense of their own collapse. The work is made by exploiting the incompatibility between two different painting media to create dynamic and emotive compositions. His method involves pouring gloss paint through a perforated trough across a wet oil surface, to create a grid, which is then left to dry.
The paint over a period of months is pushed, pulled, squeezed and peeled away, to reveal dramatic scarred and puckered surfaces that when hung on the wall continue to change, and take on their own form, as they slip from the support.
His work is often seen as a negotiation between control and contingency. This is apparent in his use of the grid as a device and implicit within the painting process itself. Whereas in modernism the grid proved to be a static endpoint, in Hardings work it serves as an enabling dynamic element. His new paintings show his continued investigation into ways in which to manipulate paint while retaining his characteristic flamboyant and exuberant approach. He will additionally be exhibiting for the first time sculpture and paper drawings that contribute to, and extend, his practice and thinking. This new body of work further problematises and strains the relationship between the object, matter and visuality, in addition to endangering the conventions of medium and support.
Alexis Harding was born in London 1973, and studied at Goldsmiths College, London between 1992 and 1995. His work has been exhibited internationally, with recent solo shows in Dublin, Basel and Lisbon. He has also participated in group shows in France, Italy, Germany, Austria and the United States.
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