SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- Romer Young Gallery presents Pussy Willow, a solo exhibition of new paintings and drawings by New York-based artist, Joseph Hart. This is the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.

Hart’s work is a collision of choreographed and happenstance mark-making, brutal editing and reinvention. Utilizing the tenets of drawing and painting, Hart’s process is structured around cursory gestures: errant dashes, ticks, scrawls, swoops and zigzags. This set of preliminary and exploratory maneuvers are then built upon, reconfigured or impulsively edited out until a composition begins to emerge. The results are abrupt but retain a compelling and provocative elegance.

Pussy Willow emphasizes Hart’s continued interest in the boundaries presented by scale and context, compositional management, and the paradoxical relationship between strategy and chance. Through the physical limits of his reach, the interior spaces of over-sized paintings are hastily covered with sinuous slashes and dashes in oil stick. Other canvases that have been labored on over a handful of years are rubbed and erased back to a visually anonymous state, urging the background to become the foreground, revealing the subtlest suggestion of what was once in clear view. These austere and atmospheric paintings are contrasted by playful drawings depicting loose grid motifs, or clunky and cartoonish armatures of the picture plane itself. Whereas formality and structure are mostly voided in the paintings, they are overt in the drawings, striking a sharp distinction in feeling and effect. In the artist’s words: “the paintings are a deep and fading howl; the drawings you could throw like a hatchet.”

Joseph Hart (b. 1976, New Hampshire) is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design and a 2014 Dieu Donné Workspace Residency Fellow. He has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions at Halsey Mckay Gallery, Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, David Krut Projects and The Bronx Museum of Art in New York, Galerie Vidal Saint-Phalle in Paris, Galleri Tom Christofferson in Denmark, and the Frans Masareel Center in Belgium, amongst others. His work is featured in the public collections at The Davis Museum at Wellesley College, RISD Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York. Hart lives and works in New York City.

*SHARON: JOSEPH HART, a limited edition book published by Land and Sea, 2015. 157 pages, perfect bound, soft cover book. edition of 50. Copies will be available at the gallery and at www.landandseaeditions.virb.com.