From the heat of a New York summer, to layers of graffiti on a handball court, Belgian artist Harold Ancart distils his experiences and encounters into painterly, abstract two- and three-dimensional artworks.
Read MoreBorn in Belgium in 1980 and having received his MFA from the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Visuels de La Cambre in Belgium in 2007, Harold Ancart's canvas paintings, concrete sculptures, and large-scale installations have been exhibited in different settings around the world. These include Jaipur's Madhavendra Palace, where he created four works for The Sculpture Park: Edition 2019. Executed in oil stick on cast concrete, the artist calls these large-scale abstractions of architecture 'stairs'. The colours of the four pieces—Untitled (Jotikaa), Untitled (Harold), Untitled (Prakhar), and Untitled (Loup) (all 2018)—respond to the wall paintings of the palace in which they are situated.
The initial kernel of Harold Ancart's 'stairs' can be found in his series of pool-themed sculptures from 2017. Inspired by the heat of that summer and the lack of private swimming pools in New York, the artist sculpted each work from Styrofoam, cast them in concrete, and then painted their surfaces with oil stick.
In 2019, Harold Ancart completed a public installation commissioned by the Public Art Fund in New York, where he has lived and worked since 2007. Inspired by the thousands of handball courts in the city and the way their layers of graffiti, damage, and patching evoke the gestures of abstract painting, Ancart created a 16-foot-high wall atop a concrete floor, painted to evoke the lines and wear of a handball court.
In addition to his sculptural endeavours, Harold Ancart produces a range of works on canvas. Often science fiction-esque in their imagery, Harold Ancart's paintings are abstract depictions of surreal scenes, such as geometric flowers blooming against a dark background, as in Untitled (2015), or iceberg-like forms floating along a crimson ocean, as in Untitled (2018).
Harold Ancart's artworks can be found in the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Fondation Beyeler, Basel; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, amongst other prestigious locations. Harold Ancart's exhibitions include The Collection (I): Highlights for a Future, Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent (2019); Peindre La Nuit, Centre Pompidou-Metz (2018); and Harold Ancart with Michel François and Gabriel Kuri, La Comète, Liège, Belgium (2017).
Biography by Casey Carsel | Ocula | 2020
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