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Alexis Harding, Crack Tip (Unraveller), 2012
(detail)
Oil and gloss on MDF, 244 x 122 cm
Mummery + Schnelle is pleased to announce an exhibition of
recent work by Alexis Harding.
The relationship between what has happened, and what has been
done, is not always clear in Alexis Harding's work. Nor is
the status of the material his practice corrals into place
a clear cut question of cause and effect, or of the essential
and the superfluously contingent. An awareness of questions
of agency and possibility, the structures in which these occur,
and the ways in which these react back upon one another are
part of the disruptive but fecund power of his paintings.
Recent paintings demonstrate a technical approach in some
respects unchanged
from earlier work, but are offered up as a difference on another
level, like the same sound caught by differently configured
microphones. A gradated spectrum of gloss paint poured through
a partitioned container and moved across a surface of wet
oil colour on panel is a recent organising principle. These
panels often take a regularised format, the 8' x 4' of a standard
mdf sheet, or perhaps the circular tondo form. The upper skin
of the paint in some of these works has left incremental ridges
depending on interruptions of its journey across the surface,
these ridges acting as a different sort of graphic trace to
the initial frictionless pouring.
For all their arresting power, these paintings remain in some
way spare or frail, a
trail of matter. Some of the results coincide with certain
other sorts of
matrices: practices of looking, aesthetic paradigms and models.
The paintings can present a grand aspect here, a baroque dynamism
there, and recently, a new sort of blankness or lack of modulation,
seeming to emphasise the 'thingness' of the works, the way
they articulate with the architecture of their display, and
a new sharpening of their address to our mobile bodily encounter
with them. *
* These passages have been taken from a text by Stuart Elliot
commissioned to accompany Alexis Harding’s exhibition.
Alexis Harding was born in London in 1973. He studied at
Goldsmiths College from 1992-95. He lives and works in London.
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