Artist Spotlight
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.
Launched in 2020, Artist Spotlight is presented once a month as a regular part of the gallery’s programming. Each Artist Spotlight highlights a work by an individual artist—made available exclusively online for forty-eight hours—together with new editorial features and selected archival content.
Artist Spotlight: Harold Ancart features a recent painting by the artist. For more information, please contact the gallery at collecting@gagosian.com.
#GagosianSpotlight
Photo: Dianna Agron
Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Summer 2023
The Summer 2023 issue of Gagosian 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.
Related Exhibitions
Related News
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)
Design
Harold Ancart
RxART
Harold Ancart is collaborating with RxART, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to help children heal through the extraordinary power of visual art, on a project for the new Primary Children’s Hospital Miller Family Campus in Lehi, Utah. Anticipated to be completed in 2024, Ancart’s mural installation depicting a variety of fish swimming in the sky will be situated in a corridor at the heart of the hospital near the main lobby, directly in front of the education center, café, and pharmacy.
Harold Ancart’s mural at the Primary Children’s Hospital Miller Family Campus in Lehi, Utah. Artwork © Harold Ancart. Photo: Kyle Aiken Photography
New Representation
Harold Ancart
Gagosian is pleased to announce the representation of Harold Ancart. The artist will have a solo exhibition with the gallery in New York in 2023.
Focusing on recognizable subjects, Ancart isolates moments of poetry in his everyday surroundings. By working serially, he moves beyond straightforward representation to emphasize the process of painting. Straddling abstraction and representation, he experiments with color and composition, allowing the operation of chance to help determine a work’s final form.
Born in Brussels and based in New York, Ancart had a solo exhibition at the Menil Collection, Houston, in 2016, and is featured in the 2022 Whitney Biennial. His work is represented in the collections of significant institutions worldwide, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Musee d’Art Moderne de Paris; and Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Switzerland.
Photo: courtesy the artist
Museum Exhibitions
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Harold Ancart
Bird Time
October 29–November 11, 2023
Ryosoku-in Temple, Kyoto, Japan
gendai-art.org
Bird Time is an exhibition by Harold Ancart at Ryosoku-in Temple, a Zen temple established in 1358, in Kyoto, Japan. Organized by the Contemporary Art Foundation, the show presents a series of paintings specifically sized to the temple’s architecture, with each painting featuring a circular window that opens onto an alternate reality. This is Ancart’s first solo exhibition in Japan.
Installation view, Harold Ancart: Bird Time, Ryosoku-in Temple, Kyoto, Japan, October 29–November 11, 2023. Artwork © Harold Ancart. Photo: Takashi Homma
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The Inner Island
April 28–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