It often feels like hyperbole to call an artist's work "a reflection of our times," but in the case of Rebecca Harper, there is a subtle truth to this idea. Dreamlike and poetic, Harper paints nature and our human interaction with the world around us, almost narratives of a quiet getaway away from the city. This month, Huxley-Parlour Gallery presents a new exhibition of new large-scale paintings by the London-based painter, her most intimate portrayals to date.
The show, titled Concrete Shadows presents all new works produced in 2019 that build and expand on themes that Harper has explored throughout her career. The five works to be exhibited explore ideas of transience, displacement and nostalgia. Harper is interested in how we interact with the world around us, specifically connected to the ideas of displacement and alienation, and the subjects of her recent paintings are situated in what Harper describes as 'middling space': camping, tree climbing or mid-road trip. Although visually referencing the aesthetic of the classic British holiday snapshot, the initial wistfulness found in these scenes is disrupted by the precarious or temporary nature of the situations and settings.
Harper's large-scale and lyrical paintings are rooted in a practice of drawing intensely from life. Harper interweaves these drawings from life with reconstructed scenes from memories, along with other mediated and second-hand imagery. Balancing both the particular and the universal, she seamlessly combines these many sources to produce plausible and richly detailed scenes that often feel dreamlike in their vivid and expressionistic colour palettes.
Rebecca Harper's solo exhibition Concrete Shadows is on view at Huxley-Parlour Gallery in London September 19th - October 12th, 2019.
