ART CITIES: N.York-Harold Ancart

Harold Ancart was born in Brussels in 1980. After starting out studying political science, he changed paths and graduated with an MFA from École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Visuels de La Cambre, Brussels, in 2007. His paintings, sculptures, and installations explore our experience of natural landscapes and built environments. Alluding to a range of art historical sources and often characterized by abstract passages of color, they are sometimes arranged into multipart tableaux.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Gagosian Archive

Harold Ancart presents new works in his solo exhibition “Painting”. 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. 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. Despite having been raised and educated in Belgium, Ancart developed a practice rooted in the history of American painting and abstraction, showing the influence of such artists as Richard Diebenkorn, Helen Frankenthaler, Brice Marden, and Wayne Thiebaud. Focusing on recognizable subjects, he isolates moments of poetry in everyday surroundings. Working serially, he moves beyond simple representation to emphasize the process of painting. And, straddling abstraction and representation, he experiments with color and composition, allowing the operation of chance to help determine a work’s final form. Ancart’s paintings of trees blur the boundaries between figure and ground while echoing elements of the work of Gustav Klimt, René Magritte, Piet Mondrian and Egon Schiele. In his seascapes, Ancart employs simplified compositions to focus on vivid, almost psychedelic color combinations. And in a series of paintings of icebergs, begun in January 2018 in response to a severe New York winter, he continues to exhibit a fascination with elemental subjects that prompt sustained contemplation. Ancart often works at a very large scale; in 2018, he exhibited “Untitled (the great night)”, a 15-by-44-foot site-specific painting, in the front window of the Shigeru Ban–designed Centre Pompidou-Metz, France, as part of the group exhibition “Painting the Night”. Ancart also explores his themes and ideas in three dimensions. In a set of floor-based pigmented concrete sculptures from 2014, for instance, he presents a series of fragile-looking, quasi-organic forms suggestive of simple boats or troughs. The works’ titles, which include “Black Caviar” and “Grand Flaneur”, refer to famous racehorses, stressing the motif of movement and rest. His pool sculptures, begun in 2017, are cast concrete reliefs laid flat on pedestals and painted in colors reminiscent of his work on canvas. In these pared-down structures, he again toys with painterly oppositions of surface and depth, abstraction and figuration. By changing the scale of a familiar feature, he renders it uncanny, even surreal. And in 2019, with the support of Public Art Fund, he produced “Subliminal Standard”, a 16-foot-high freestanding concrete sculpture paying tribute to the incidental patterns generated by players on the walls of New York City’s handball courts, for Brooklyn’s Cadman Plaza.

Photo Left: Harold Ancart, Untitled, 2023, Oil stick and pencil on canvas, in artist’s frame, 81 × 71 × 2 ¾ inches (205.7 × 180.3 × 7 cm), © Harold Ancart. Photo: JSP Art Photography, Courtesy the artist and Gagosian. Right: Harold Ancart, Untitled, 2017 Oil stick and pencil on canvas, in artist’s frame, 80 × 96 × 2 ¼ inches (203.2 × 243.8 × 5.7 cm), Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Switzerland© Harold Ancart. Photo: JSP Art Photography

Info: Gagosian Gallery, 541 West 24th Street, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 3/5-16/6/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, https://gagosian.com/