HAROLD ANCART: MAISON ANCART
Gagosian is pleased to announce Maison Ancart, an exhibition of new paintings by Harold Ancart.
October 14 – December 20, 2024
The paintings in Maison Ancart are conceived in conversation with the spirit of radical freedom and innovation put forth by pioneering abstractionists, from the Post-Impressionists and the School of Paris to postwar American artists, among others. The trees, meadows, ponds, mountains, and other features operate as archetypal forms that Ancart revisits throughout this body of work. According to the artist, these subjects serve as an “alibi” for painting, providing a platform through which he can experiment with paint.
Ancart develops his paintings with the medium of oil stick, using saturated colors and boldly defined forms to picture imagined places abstracted from landscape motifs. He emphasizes the primacy of his artmaking process, defining his subjects to alternately anchor the compositions and disrupt their stability. The viewpoints established are from below or straight on, emphasizing their scale and the artist’s negotiation of surface and depth, abstraction and representation. Made with attention to the boundaries between forms and their contours, the paintings are unified by Ancart’s articulation of horizons through juxtapositions of color, offering through lines across the canvases.
Trees are the most prominent element in these works. These vary in shape and silhouette, distilling the structures of trunks and foliage into abstract passages. The duo of Deux Arbres (2024) echo one another in their massed shapes and wavering contours, the contrasts of color introducing ambiguities between figure and ground. A grove of similar shapes in a dark blue palette occupies the middle ground of Le Grand Parc (2024), differentiated from another pair of trees with branching structures that end in pillowy clusters of bright red leaves.
On the upper floor of the gallery is a single panoramic work: The upper reaches (2024), an alpine triptych more than 25 feet wide that suggests a view through a sequence of windows. In dialogue with mountainous subjects by Paul Cezanne and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, the painting is defined by silhouettes of trees in the foreground, arrayed in pictorial counterpoint to the ridges and sky above.