PARIS.- Gagosian announces Maison Ancart, an exhibition of new paintings by Harold Ancart, opening on October 14, 2024, at 4 rue de Ponthieu.
The paintings in Maison Ancart are conceived in conversation with the spirit of radical freedom and innovation put forth by pioneering abstractionists, from the Post-Impressionists and the School of Paris to postwar American artists, among others. The trees, meadows, ponds, mountains, and other features operate as archetypal forms that Ancart revisits throughout this body of work. According to the artist, these subjects serve as an “alibi” for painting, providing a platform through which he can experiment with paint.
Ancart develops his paintings with the medium of oil stick, using saturated colors and boldly defined forms to picture imagined places abstracted from landscape motifs. He emphasizes the primacy of his artmaking process, defining his subjects to alternately anchor the compositions and disrupt their stability. The viewpoints established are from below or straight on, emphasizing their scale and the artist’s negotiation of surface and depth, abstraction and representation. Made with attention to the boundaries between forms and their contours, the paintings are unified by Ancart’s articulation of horizons through juxtapositions of color, offering through lines across the canvases.
Trees are the most prominent element in these works. These vary in shape and silhouette, distilling the structures of trunks and foliage into abstract passages. The duo of Deux Arbres (2024) echo one another in their massed shapes and wavering contours, the contrasts of color introducing ambiguities between figure and ground. A grove of similar shapes in a dark blue palette occupies the middle ground of Le Grand Parc (2024), differentiated from another pair of trees with branching structures that end in pillowy clusters of bright red leaves.
Branches (2024) represents a network of dark limbs tipped by blossoms over a fiery warm ground, evoking Utagawa Hiroshige’s 1857 woodblock print Plum Garden in Kameido and Vincent van Gogh’s painted interpretation of it from 1887. L’étang le soir (2024) is scene of a pond in ambient twilight, its atmospheric character emerging through compositional doubling. The staggered repetitions of dark trees and smaller shapes in primary colors are roughly mirrored in the painting’s watery lower half, their reflections disrupted by blue currents.
On the upper floor of the gallery is a single panoramic work: The upper reaches (2024), an alpine triptych more than 25 feet wide that suggests a view through a sequence of windows. In dialogue with mountainous subjects by Paul Cezanne and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, the painting is defined by silhouettes of trees in the foreground, arrayed in pictorial counterpoint to the ridges and sky above.
Harold Ancart was born in Brussels in 1980 and lives and works in New York. Collections include Centre Pompidou, Paris; Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris; Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel; Lenbachhaus, Munich; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Menil Collection, Houston; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Solo exhibitions include Untitled (there is no there there), Menil Collection, Houston (2016); Subliminal Standard, Cadman Plaza Park, New York (2019–20); and Bird Time, Ryosoku-in Temple, Kyoto, Japan (2023). Ancart has published several artist’s books, including Soft Places (Triangle Books, 2018) and Tokyo Private (Un Roman Photo) (Zolo Press, 2019).
