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Long Room: Drying Depot

Harding’s solo show featured 6 paintings from 2012 for his first exhibition in New Zealand at the Two Rooms Gallery, Auckland (26 October - 24 November 2012). These comprised 6 circular tondos varying from approximately 50-100 cms in diameter: World View (illustration 1), Triptych (illustrations 3,4,5), World View colour chart (illustration 6) and Needle time (illustration 7). In addition, there were 2 rectangular works, Colour chart (lime green through mid-green) (70 x 110 cm, illustration 2) and Cut and Bend (120 x 100 cm, illustration 8) using spectrally-organised bands of colours, whose surfaces have been 'squeezed' and manipulated by the artist subjecting the paint to excessive strain producing surfaces responsive to thermal dynamics. Both the installation and the title of the show refer to the ways in which Harding’s works examine entropy and thereby transform the gallery space into a ‘drying depot’ as their thick impasto ‘dries out’. This term also references the experimental drying times that each painting requires to be completed and the sense of the long room gallery as a research laboratory testing this process in a quasi-scientific way.

Employing Harding’s recognizable ‘Grunge Abstraction’ style that he developed in 1990s and which won him the John Moore’s 23 painting prize (2004), his research since then, as the Portfolio demonstrates, provides a sustained questioning of the malleability of paint, entropic degradation and the impact of multi-directional gravitational force. The paintings sagging and dripping impasto and changing wrinkled surface effects exploit the interface between the paint as medium, the ‘active’ process of the drying process and the time this takes as a reference to time-based media. Portfolio evidences research development.

See: http://tworooms.co.nz/exhibition/long-room-drying-depot/

The exhibition was reviewed in the New Zealand Herald: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/entertainment/news/article.cfm?c_id=1501119&objectid=10849539

http://eyecontactsite.com/2012/11/alexis-harding-paintings