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Events

Takashi Murakami, Gargantua on Your Palm, 2018 © 2018 Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All rights reserved

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

Harold Ancart: Soft Places, 2nd ed. (Brussels: Triangle Books, 2018)

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)

Harold Ancart, Subliminal Standard, 2019, installation view, Cadman Plaza Park, New York © Harold Ancart. Photo: Nicholas Knight

Public Installation

Harold Ancart
Subliminal Standard

May 1, 2019–March 1, 2020
Cadman Plaza Park, New York
www.publicartfund.org

Commissioned by Public Art Fund, Harold Ancart has created this painted concrete sculpture as an homage to the accidental abstract compositions that appear on New York City’s ubiquitous freestanding handball walls. Fascinated by seemingly quotidian found forms and patterns, Ancart sees the mismatched repainting and partial repairs that mask graffiti and other wear on these courts as “subliminal,” inadvertent masterpieces and relishes their fortuitous connection to the canon of abstract art.

Harold Ancart, Subliminal Standard, 2019, installation view, Cadman Plaza Park, New York © Harold Ancart. Photo: Nicholas Knight

Announcements

Harold Ancart’s mural at the Primary Children’s Hospital Miller Family Campus in Lehi, Utah. Artwork © Harold Ancart. Photo: Kyle Aiken Photography

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

Photo: courtesy the artist

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

Still from “Harold Ancart: Subliminal Standard”

Video

Harold Ancart
Subliminal Standard

In this video produced by Public Art Fund, Harold Ancart discusses the creation of Subliminal Standard (2019), which was installed in Cadman Plaza Park in Brooklyn, New York, from May 1, 2019, through March 1, 2020. Commissioned by Public Art Fund, Ancart’s painted concrete sculpture was made in homage to the accidental abstract compositions that appear on New York City’s ubiquitous freestanding handball walls. Fascinated by found forms and patterns, Ancart sees the mismatched repainting and partial repairs to mask graffiti and other wear on these courts as “subliminal,” inadvertent masterpieces and relishes their fortuitous connection to the canon of abstraction.

Still from “Harold Ancart: Subliminal Standard”

Museum Exhibitions

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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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

Helen Frankenthaler, Overture, 1992 © 2023 Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

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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

Harold Ancart, The Guiding Light, 2021, installation view, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York © Harold Ancart. Photo: Ryan Lowry

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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

Harold Ancart, Untitled (Prakhar), 2018, installation view, Nahargarh Fort, Jaipur, India © Harold Ancart

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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

Helen Frankenthaler, Star Gazing, 1989, collection of Helen Frankenthaler Foundation © 2019 Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

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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

Installation view, High Anxiety: New Acquisitions, Rubell Museum, Miami, November 30, 2016–August 25, 2017. Artwork © Cy Gavin. Photo: Chi Lam, courtesy Rubell Museum, Miami

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High Anxiety
New Acquisitions

November 30, 2016–August 25, 2017
Rubell Museum, Miami
rubellmuseum.org

High Anxiety: New Acquisitions presents a selection of artworks by thirty-two artists acquired by the museum since 2014, many of which explore polarizing social and political concerns through a broad spectrum of practices. In gauging the output and energies of these artists we find creative currents that speak to our shared state of uncertainty, nervousness, and pessimism. Work by Harold Ancart, Cy Gavin, and Jordan Wolfson is included.

Installation view, High Anxiety: New Acquisitions, Rubell Museum, Miami, November 30, 2016–August 25, 2017. Artwork © Cy Gavin. Photo: Chi Lam, courtesy Rubell Museum, Miami

Harold Ancart, Untitled (there is no there there), 2014/2016 (detail), Menil Collection, Houston © Harold Ancart

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Harold Ancart
Untitled (there is no there there)

August 18–October 23, 2016
Menil Collection, Houston
www.menil.org

In 2014, Harold Ancart, a Belgian artist living and working in New York, transformed the trunk of his jeep into a studio and set out on a road trip across the United States. He wanted to experience the vastness of the country he now called home. Along the way, he would pull his car over whenever he saw something that moved him to draw. Untitled (there is no there there) (2014/2016), a group of twenty-seven drawings completed over the course of his journey, reflects the immediacy and vitality of his method.

Harold Ancart, Untitled (there is no there there), 2014/2016 (detail), Menil Collection, Houston © Harold Ancart

See all Museum Exhibitions for Harold Ancart