About
A lot of people focus on what they can control and forget about what they cannot control, but I say, let’s do the opposite.
—Harold Ancart
Harold Ancart’s paintings, sculptures, and installations explore our experience of natural landscapes and built environments. Alluding to a range of art historical sources and often characterized by abstract passages of color, they are sometimes arranged into multipart tableaux.
Ancart was born in Brussels in 1980. After starting out studying political science, he changed paths and graduated with an MFA from École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Visuels de La Cambre, Brussels, in 2007. He now lives and works in New York. As a child, he was a fan of comic books and manga, and was inspired by Belgian pioneers Hergé, creator of Tintin, and Peyo, originator of the Smurfs. He later discovered others in the field such as Katsuhiro Otomo and Frank Miller, and to artists including Frank Auerbach, James Ensor, Oskar Kokoschka, and Léon Spilliaert. A 2014 road trip across the United States was a critical energizing event for Ancart, and a 2016 exhibition at the Menil Collection in Houston of the drawings he produced in his mobile studio during the journey marked a turning point in his career.
Despite having been raised and educated in Belgium, Ancart developed a practice rooted in the history of American painting and abstraction, showing the influence of such artists as Richard Diebenkorn, Helen Frankenthaler, Brice Marden, and Wayne Thiebaud. Focusing on recognizable subjects, he isolates moments of poetry in everyday surroundings. Working serially, he moves beyond simple representation to emphasize the process of painting. And, straddling abstraction and representation, he experiments with color and composition, allowing the operation of chance to help determine a work’s final form.
Photo: courtesy the artist
#HaroldAncart
Now available
Gagosien Quarterly Summer 2023
The Summer 2023 issue of Gagosien Quarterly is now available, featuring Richard Avedon’s Marilyn Monroe, actor, New York, May 6, 1957 on its cover.
Harold Ancart and Andrew Winer
Harold Ancart speaks with novelist Andrew Winer about being present, finding freedom in tension, and pathological escapism.
Fairs, Events & Announcements
Fundraiser
Artist Plate Project 2022
Coalition for the Homeless
Launching May 22, 2023, 10am edt
Limited-edition bone china plates produced by Prospect and featuring artwork by more than forty artists—including Virgil Abloh, Derrick Adams, Harold Ancart, Georg Baselitz, Amoako Boafo, Mark Grotjahn, Takashi Murakami, Albert Oehlen, Ed Ruscha, Anna Weyant, and Jonas Wood—will be sold through Artware Editions to raise funds for the Coalition’s lifesaving programs. The funds raised by the sale of the plates will provide food, crisis services, housing, and other critical aid to thousands of people experiencing homelessness and instability. The purchase of one plate can feed one hundred homeless and hungry New Yorkers.
Takashi Murakami, Gargantua on Your Palm, 2018 © 2018 Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All rights reserved
Artist Spotlight
Harold Ancart
February 22–28, 2023
Harold Ancart’s paintings, sculptures, and installations explore our experience of natural landscapes and built environments. His works allude to a range of art historical sources and are often characterized by abstract passages of color. Focusing on recognizable subjects, Ancart isolates moments of poetry in everyday surroundings.
Photo: Dianna Agron
Online Reading
Harold Ancart
Soft Places
Harold Ancart: Soft Places is available for online reading from February 22 through March 23 as part of Artist Spotlight: Harold Ancart. It features selected works on paper that Ancart made between 2009 and 2015 as well as writing by the artist. Published by Triangle Books, the book presents Ancart’s first semiabstract and monochromatic drawings and his psychedelic colorful landscapes.
Harold Ancart: Soft Places, 2nd ed. (Brussels: Triangle Books, 2018)
Museum Exhibitions
On View
The Inner Island
Through November 4, 2023
Fondation Carmignac, Porquerolles, France
www.fondationcarmignac.com
This exhibition, which features more than eighty works by fifty artists, presents visitors with new, unknown worlds floating outside familiar geographies and temporalities. The artists included break away from reality, bringing to life fictional, mental, and abstract islands. Work by Harold Ancart, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Alexander Calder, Helen Frankenthaler, Simon Hantaï, Roy Lichtenstein, Albert Oehlen, and Christopher Wool is included.
Helen Frankenthaler, Overture, 1992 © 2023 Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
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Whitney Biennial 2022
Quiet as It’s Kept
April 6–October 16, 2022
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
whitney.org
The Whitney Biennial was established in 1932 by the museum’s founder, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, to chart developments in art in the United States. The 2022 Biennial presents dynamic selections that take different forms over the course of the exhibition: artworks—even walls—change, and performance animates the galleries and objects. With an intergenerational and interdisciplinary roster of sixty-three artists and collectives at all points in their careers, many of whom work with an interdisciplinary perspective, the Biennial surveys and presents the art and ideas of our time. Work by Harold Ancart, Ellen Gallagher, Cy Gavin, and Rick Lowe is included.
Harold Ancart, The Guiding Light, 2021, installation view, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York © Harold Ancart. Photo: Ryan Lowry
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Harold Ancart in
The Sculpture Park: Second Edition
December 9, 2018–October 2020
Sculpture Park, Nahargarh Fort, Jaipur, India
www.thesculpturepark.in
Four sculptures by Harold Ancart are included in the second exhibition organized at the Sculpture Park in Madhavendra Palace within the historic Nahargarh Fort in Jaipur, India—the country’s first public park for contemporary sculpture. Ancart loosely defines the small-scale works, which are made with oil stick on cast concrete, as “stairs.” The colors of each piece respond to the wall paintings of the room in which it is situated. Originally constructed as apartments for the Maharaja’s queens inside the eighteenth-century fort, the Madhavendra Palace is now the setting for large-scale art exhibitions.
Harold Ancart, Untitled (Prakhar), 2018, installation view, Nahargarh Fort, Jaipur, India © Harold Ancart
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Peindre la nuit
October 13, 2018–April 15, 2019
Centre Pompidou-Metz, France
www.centrepompidou-metz.fr
This exhibition explores the night in modern and contemporary painting, music, literature, photography, and video. With a focus on the perception of night rather than its iconography, the exhibition intends to be a nocturnal experience. Work by Harold Ancart, Francis Bacon, Helen Frankenthaler, Roy Lichtenstein, Man Ray, Pablo Picasso, and Ed Ruscha is included.
Helen Frankenthaler, Star Gazing, 1989, collection of Helen Frankenthaler Foundation © 2019 Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York