DANESE -> Andy Harper: Recent Paintings and Works on Paper

"Five Stars" "★★★★★"

Review of Andy Haper's recent paintings and works:

The DANESE gallery is super impressive with super tall open ceilings and huge oak exposed rafters and a skylight! Also the gallery has lots of floor space. If you walk into this gallery and there is mediocre or sub-par art on its walls the space will totally overpower it.

This was not the case with Harper's recent paintings! The gallery has a perfect mix of scale and grandeur that complimented Harpers paintings perfectly which were large and extremely detailed. He featured colorful intricate leafy patterns in exquisite detail that covered the whole canvass leaving no empty space or white space. Beautifully reminiscent of royal medieval tapestries, the paintings made a grand and kingly impression. These would be equally fantastic sitting in a museum, or in the lobby of a high end doctors office, or in the den of a Soho condo. This kind of presence for paintings is hard to get in today's art world. My guess is that Harper put so much dedication to detailing his patterns that the time and dedication of the artist somehow got infused into the paintings themselves. (a very new age theory, even for me, but you'll know what I mean when you see them) Fantastic work! Another MUST SEE! You can preview Andy Harper's paintings but you should see the show in person!

Press Release for Any Harper's solo show:

ANDY HARPER
Recent Paintings and Works on Paper

October 16 – November 14, 2009
Opening Reception: October 15, 6-8 pm

Danese is pleased to announce its inaugural exhibition of paintings by Andy Harper. The opening reception will be held Thursday, October 15 from 6 to 8pm.

Andy Harper’s paintings enchant and bewitch, drawing viewers into a terrestrial labyrinth – a world subsumed by a web of invented fauna punctuated and relieved by coves of light, and imagery that implies a visual relationship between the substructure of the human anatomy and botanical specimens. Leaves, trees, tendrils stretch across the entirety of the canvas, providing little opportunity for rest and air as nature’s endless tapestry rises to the surface. Interwoven and complex, Harper’s paintings reconsider and employ a broad range of art historical references: Medievalism, the condensed imagery of Breugel and Bosch, the longstanding theme of memento mori, painting of the Victorian era, and England’s tradition of botanical classification.

Rendered with extreme detail and an ineffable sense of both reality and the fantastical, Harper’s works are arenas for discovery and camouflage. The visual lexicon – flashes of light from unidentified sources, the enumerable vegetal forms entwined with limbs of human anatomy, and the wan ivory vertebrae – marks the exuberance of growth as well as its inevitable companion, death and decay. It is a world known and imagined, familiar yet suspenseful, for it is the very progress of life that flourishes before our eyes.

Andy Harper was born in the United Kingdom. He received his BA from Brighton Polytechnic in 1993, a Master’s Degree in Fine Art from the Royal College of Art in 1995, and an additional Master’s Degree in Visual Culture from Middlesex University in 1999. Mr. Harper lives in London and has exhibited extensively throughout Europe. This is his first solo exhibition in the United States.

An online catalogue for this exhibition can be found at www.danese.com. For further information please contact Carol Corey or Alexandra Woodworth at 212/223-2227 or alexandra@danese.com.(from www.danese.com)