Alexis Harding Alexis Harding was born in London in 1973. He studied fine art at Goldsmiths’ College, University of London from 1992 until 1995. His first one-person exhibition took place at the Project Room, Galerij S65 in Aalst, Belgium, in 1997 followed by solo shows at Andrew Mummery Gallery, London, and Rubicon Gallery, Dublin, in 1998, again at the Andrew Mummery Gallery (2000 and 2003) and Rubicon Gallery (2002 and 2006), and at Galeria Pedro Cera (2001), Galerie Katherina Kröhn, Basel (2002), Marella Arte Contemporanea, Milan (2004), and Allerart, Bludenz, Austria (2006). Since 1995 he has shown extensively in two-person and group exhibitions in Ireland, Great Britain and Europe. He was First Prizewinner at John Moores 23, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool in 2004.

His work has been the subject of numerous essays and articles, the most important of which include Mark Gisbourne ‘…not fade away’ in Alexis Harding (London: Andrew Mummery Gallery, 1998), Caoimhin Mac Giolla Leith, ‘Unloosing Control’ in Alexis Harding: Selected Works 2001-2002 (Dublin: Rubicon Gallery, 2002), J.J. Charlesworth, Painting by the Skin of your Eyes (London: Andrew Mummery Gallery, 2003), Martin Holman, Time Share (London: Eagle Gallery, 2005) and Chris Townsend, New Art from London (London: Thames & Hudson, 2006).

Alexis Harding's paintings emphasise their own inescapable materiality through a playful chemistry and a vertiginous sense of their own collapse. The work is driven by ideas and process simultaneously and is made by exploiting the incompatibility between artists’ oil paint and household gloss paint. The work begins by passing a perforated gutter filled with gloss paint over a wet monochrome oil paint based surface, to create a grid or a series of lines. This initial action is manipulated and changed over the preceding months; where the paint is subjected to various 'behavioural processes' in relation to the idea of each piece. Often it is pushed, pulled, squeezed and shaken to reveal wrinkled, scarred and puckered surfaces that when hung or leant on a wall continue to change, and take on their own form, as they slip from the support.

Harding has described his work as being made "within a set of limits that I can only discover by squeezing and pushing these limits to extremes: to present prosaic stuff (paint) in a moment of change and transformation. I want to make a painting through allowing one cohering structure to vanish while another emerges" (2004) and more recently (2007) "the work is deeply controlled yet somehow makes itself through failure and cancellation. I am surprised that on one painting on one day I can be thinking about architecture and the next day on another the Internal body, skin and the pulmonary action of the heart. This is absurd yet completely makes sense! Some paintings and ideas in the studio grow and move over months whilst the site specific wet pieces are temporary and exist for a short period. These two ways of working seem to have liberated each other".

Click on image to view

Artist Homepage | Resume | Bibliography | Past Exhibitions