For Smart Living – Brian Harte

Butler Gallery is very pleased to present a solo exhibition by the Kinsale-based artist Brian Harte, his first museum show in Ireland. For the past ten years his career has focused on international commitments so this exhibition has allowed the artist to step back from commercial gallery demands to reflect and experiment. In addition to delivering a new suite of paintings the exhibition also includes an ambitious new sculptural work constructed with everyday building materials like raw chipboard and Unilin insulation boards. Harte conceived the exhibition title, ‘For Smart Living’, from Unilin’s pithy strapline in their advertising of these boards. This sculptural work deftly incorporates familiar elements that are layered within his paintings and act like touchstones to his wider practice. Included are a diverse medley of items such as domestic wall tiles, a polystyrene head, a piece of Carrara marble, a ball of tin foil, fluorescent tubing, MRI’s of a recent knee injury and untethered electrical wires.

The paintings are expressionistic in nature yet create a balance with nods to representation and abstraction. Harte infuses rich colour on large expanses of the canvas and then works up concentrated areas of detail. He creates paintings that deconstruct interior settings and employs his home and his family’s possessions to inform a wider conversation in the studio. He sometimes refers to the objects that populate his paintings as thumbnails within the picture to reference an event, a memory, a vision. They often reveal faceless ghostly figures, small tables displaying still lifes and keys to other mysteries—hanging lightbulbs, children’s toys, graphic symbols, tricycles—the ephemera of daily life. Each painting is a new room to be explored, a room utterly contained with its own enigmatic narrative.

About the Artist:

Brian Harte (b. 1978, South Tipperary) lives and works in Kinsale in Ireland. He has exhibited widely internationally and this year had a solo exhibition To the Harbour Place at Molesworth Gallery, Dublin. He has had solo exhibitions in Ghent, Belgium, Los Angeles, USA, MAKI Gallery, Tokyo, Napolie, Italy, GNYP Gallery, Berlin and been included in many group exhibitions worldwide. He has received several Arts Council of Ireland Bursary Awards and participated in many artist residencies. His work is represented in numerous prestigious private and public collections including the Arts Council of Ireland, Office of Public Works, University College Cork, Bank of Ireland, Allied Irish Bank, OKETA Collection, Japan and Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany. He is represented by Tatjana Pieters Gallery, Belgium, MAKI Gallery, Tokyo and Simchowitz Gallery, Los Angeles.