HARDY MARBLES - BRADLEY HARMS

BRADLEY HARMS 
HARDY MARBLES 

MAY 9  -  JUNE 8
OPENING RECEPTION MAY 9,  6-8PM

W I N S O R  G A L L E R Y 
258 East 1st Avenue, Vancouver, V5T 1A6

We are pleased to present Hardy Marbles, new work by Bradley Harms. This will be Harms' first solo exhibition in Vancouver. Please join us at the opening reception or visit the exhibition, Harms work will not disappoint! Curious on what the show is all about? Brad has written a very interesting artist statement about the work below, peruse at your leisure. 

Artist Statement by Bradley Harms:

As I pay close attention to the material aspects of painting, my work certainly exudes a sense of technological awareness. These paintings are contemporary objects with seams and edges that are confident and exacted. The surfaces, painted with mechanical conviction, undoubtedly borrow from the tropes of digital art and, though I enjoy the mimicry, I eschew machine techniques by hand applying the delicately modulated lines; trumping the manufactured aesthetic with the hand made.

The precision of the lines, themselves, hints at technology, where the gesture repeated forms elaborate and complex systems, flipping between surface assertion and spatial invitation. These accumulations hint at endlessness, as they exceed the viewer’s visual awareness; a contemplation of modernism is transferred into a more frighteningly contemporary construct.  Unlike the modernist impulse, they are not intended to be reductive but additive in nature, subsequently allowing for a field of discourse that is open-ended and reflective of our techno-driven ability to process vast amounts of information: The simple relationships of very complex systems.

What can be certain is that the work employs a hybridization of style.  It dismantles abstraction, re-configuring it in order to create a viable and forward-looking syntax that reflects current social and technological developments without simply mirroring them. These are perfectionist paintings that extol imperfect formal and social realms.  I craft paintings that are slick as well as sincere, diagrammatic as well as sensual, almost self-conscious of their identity as abstract paintings. As we move towards the world of the pixel, the world of paint becomes evermore alchemical and seductive—more viral—responding to that which seeks to obliterate it by mutating and renewing itself once again into the great “other”.

Though this work, I acknowledge that painting is and will be continue to be problematic.  I feel a responsibility to continue parsing painting’s language; its authority, history, and affiliations. And besides, I find problems more stimulating than presupposed solutions.