Marie Harnett Exhibition

Theodore:Art

[Image: Marie Harnett "Studio” (2015) pencil on paper, (paper) 4 x 5 1/2 inches (image) 1 5/8 x 3 7/8 in.]

This event has ended.

Theodore:Art presents the first US solo exhibition of work by British artist Marie Harnett. Harnett makes series of highly detailed, minuscule drawings, derived from film stills, which capture fleeting moments of drama, suspense or beauty..

The source for Marie Harnett’s small-scale drawings are films and for each one she transposes a carefully selected still in precise detail. Her process requires her to watch film trailers online without sound or colour, frame by frame, until she sees something that inspires her. Harnett undermines cinematic process - reverting back to storyboards and the merest hint of plot in a film that Harnett probably won’t ever watch in its entirety. By removing them from their film context and reworking them as intricate pencil studies, Harnett focusses on every aspect of pose, light and texture - in many cases emphasising subtle nuances which are lost in the film as a whole. The resultant jewel-like images, a diminutive 2 x 4 inches, suggest a new way of thinking about narrative and new stories that may arise in the viewer’s imagination.

In this exhibition, Harnett has recreated images from cinematic adaptations of historic literary masterworks such as Anna Karenina, 2012 and Great Gatsby, 2013, and contemporary films, including Rush, 2013. As the characters in the work are actors playing fictional personae, there is the doubled recognition of the real person, a thespian in cinematic contextual guise, caught in a drawn image.

Marie Harnett (born 1983 in Hertfordshire) is a British artist. She studied drawing and painting at Edinburgh College of Art from where she graduated in 2006. She has exhibited in solo exhibitions at Alan Cristea Gallery, London (2011) and Galleria Bonomo, Rome (2014). Her group exhibitions include “A Parliament of Lines” at Edinburgh City Art Centre, Edinburgh (2012) which travelled to Pier Arts Centre, Orkney (2013), “Beyond Reality: British Painting Today” at Galerie Rudolfinum, Prague (2012) and “Last Year in Marienbad: A Film as Art” at Bremen Kunsthalle, Bremen (2015). Harnett’s works are in international public and private collections including the Yale Centre for British Art, Connecticut; the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Government Art Collection, UK, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Scotland, and the British Museum, London. She is currently working on a new body of drawings and prints for her next solo show with the Alan Cristea Gallery, London in 2017.

Her work is represented by the Alan Cristea Gallery, London. She lives and works in London.