NEW YORK, NY.- Gagosian has opened 'Paintings', an exhibition of new work by Harold Ancart in New York. This exhibition follows the gallery’s July 2022 announcement of his representation, and will continue on until June 16th, 2023.
In his atmospheric canvases, Ancart uses color and texture to blur the boundaries between observed and imagined realities. Pairing figuration with vibrant abstract passages, the artist explores natural landscapes and built environments, where he discovers moments of unexpected poetry. Though born and educated in Belgium, Ancart maintains a practice rooted in the influence of American abstract painters, including Richard Diebenkorn, Helen Frankenthaler, and Clyfford Still.
The works in Ancart’s Gagosian debut suggest a place rooted in a longing for escape and use an arboreal motif to explore nuances of color and shape. Having previously depicted other elemental forms such as clouds, fires, and icebergs, the artist has stated that outward subject matter serves primarily as an “alibi” for painterly experimentation. Two large landscape canvases are also included. One depicts the sea at night and immerses the viewer in a composition featuring a large, truncated moon. The other, also a seascape, is bordered by a large field of red and conveys the impression of a prospecting gaze through a telescope.
The paintings on view in New York further extend Ancart’s practice, translating their maker’s experience of walking without a destination in mind into a meditation on the very idea of location.
Ancart employs the medium of oil stick to orchestrate vigorous chromatic relationships, using a patchwork of color to infuse his canvases with painterly naturalism, and further enlivens the works’ surfaces through the interpolation of smudges, scrapes, and other textural flourishes.
Harold Ancart was born in Brussels in 1980 and lives and works in New York. Collections include the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Menil Collection, Houston; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris; Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Switzerland; Lenbachhaus, Munich; and Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark. Solo exhibitions include Untitled (there is no there there), Menil Collection, Houston (2016), and Subliminal Standard, Cadman Plaza Park, New York (2019–20). Ancart has also published several artist’s books, including Soft Places (Triangle Books, 2018) and Tokyo Private (Un Roman Photo) (Zolo Press, 2019).
I think about paintings as vessels, or as means of transportation that lead to the many elsewheres that are not the here and now. -Harold Ancart
