[ezcol_1half]JANE HARRIS
OUT THERE
15 March – 14 April
Jane Harris’s first solo exhibition in London for 10 years, presents a group of oil paintings on wood and canvas that reveal developments in a distinctive and subtle language of painting that has been described as a kind of ‘rococo minimalism’. (Barry Schwabsky).
Harris’s paintings originate in the geometric form of the ellipse – an elastic shape that lends itself to allusion and can take on multiple identities. Drawn from templates, the forms are painted in various relationships to each other, in two or three colours. From these simple parameters she is able to create images of astonishing beauty that remind how the basic effects of all painting lie in the movement of light passing across a surface which carries the substance of ‘formed and transformed’ matter.
Harris’s paintings express an intense involvement with the natural world and phenomena that exist within it: the sun backlighting a cloud, or the movement of wind on water, for example. Her elliptical forms have a slippery kind of ambiguity and through her handling of paint she proposes various possibilities for how we perceive them. They can be apprehended as shapes which appear flat on the surface of a support while simultaneously carrying a sense of recessional depth. “Are they large or small, are they objects, tunnels, pools, islands or geometric patterns, motifs, signals, emblems, are they two dimensional or three dimensional? And where are they exactly, in what sort of space?” (J.H.) The edges of the shapes are surrounded, both within and without, by an ‘aura’ of brush marks – painted wet into wet – that give the work fluid optical effects that change as the viewer moves around the paintings.
Jane Harris has shown internationally since the mid 1990s, with recent solo exhibitions at FRAC Artothèque du Limousin, Panazol, France; Two Rooms Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand and Galerie Hollenbach, Stuttgart, Germany. Her work is held in many major collections including Arts Council England; Fidelity Worldwide Investment; Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge and the Government Art Collection. In 1995 she was awarded an Arts Foundation Painting Fellowship and she has twice been Artist in Residence at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, in 2001 and 2015. She has been a prize winner at the John Moores Liverpool (1995) and the Jerwood Drawing Open (1996) and in 2012 she won The Sunny Dupree Family Award for a painter at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition.
Jane Harris OUT THERE Catalogue with a text by Charles Darwent
< Back
[/ezcol_1half] [ezcol_1half_end]
JANE HARRIS Wild Thing, 2018, oil on wood, 80 x 80cm
JANE HARRIS Restless Dreaming, 2017, oil on wood, 40 x 40cm
JANE HARRIS Turning Points, 2017, oil on wood, 40 x 40cm
[/ezcol_1half_end]
