NEW YORK, NY.- Gagosian announced the representation of Harold Ancart. The artist will have a solo exhibition with the gallery in New York in 2023. Born in Brussels and based in New York, Ancart had a solo exhibition at the Menil Collection, Houston, in 2016, and is featured in the 2022 Whitney Biennial. His work is represented in the collections of significant institutions worldwide, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Musee d’Art Moderne de Paris; and Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Switzerland.
Focusing on recognizable subjects, Ancart isolates moments of poetry in his everyday surroundings. By working serially, he moves beyond straightforward representation to emphasize the process of painting. Straddling abstraction and representation, he experiments with color and composition, allowing the operation of chance to help determine a work’s final form. Ancart was raised and educated in Belgium but his practice is rooted in the history of American painting and abstraction, showing the influence of Richard Diebenkorn, Helen Frankenthaler, Brice Marden, and Wayne Thiebaud, in particular.
In his paintings of trees, Ancart investigates the interplay between foliage and light, while in his seascapes, he employs simplified compositions to focus on vivid, almost psychedelic color combinations. A series of paintings of icebergs—begun in January 2018 in response to a severe New York winter—sees him continue to pursue a fascination with elemental subjects that prompt sustained contemplation.
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 boats or troughs. A series of pool sculptures, initiated in 2017, takes the form of cast concrete reliefs, laid flat on pedestals and painted in colors reminiscent of his work on canvas. In these pared-down structures, Ancart again toys with painterly oppositions of surface and depth, abstraction and figuration. By changing the scale of a familiar resource, he renders it uncanny, even surreal.
Harold Ancart was born in Brussels in 1980 and lives and works in New York. Collections include the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Menil Collection, Houston; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris; Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Switzerland; Lenbachhaus, Munich; and Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark. Solo exhibitions include Untitled (There is no there there), Menil Collection, Houston (2016) and Subliminal Standard, Cadman Plaza Park, New York (2019–20). Ancart has also published several artist’s books, including Soft Places (Triangle Books, 2018) and Tokyo Private (Un Roman Photo) (Zolo Press, 2019).
