Nino Mier Gallery is pleased to present Landscrapes, Connie Harrison’s first solo exhibition in the United States and with the gallery.
Raised on trips to England’s Peak District, Harrison approaches nature as a source of inexhaustible wonder and painting as a means of conveying something of its immensity. In Landscrapes, she shifts from expansive landscapes to individual elements of flora and fauna. By isolating and magnifying these forms, she further blurs the boundary between figuration and abstraction, inviting viewers to reconsider how images emerge from the interplay of detail, texture, and gesture.
As a self-described sculptural painter, that attention to texture is inherent to Harrison’s practice. While she spends most of her time with a brush in hand, experimentation with mediums drives her work; chief among them is microcrystalline wax, a material which allows her to push the perceptual boundaries of painting. Beginning with a vibrant base color, Harrison builds each of her compositions through successive layers of wax and oil paint, her mark-making inspired by the likes of Klimt and Monet.
Once a painting has been meticulously created, Harrison begins to deconstruct it. Using scalpels and flat knives, Harrison scrapes into the wax, manipulating it every which way to expose underlying layers as she carves new pathways across the work’s surface. Through this oscillating process of accumulation and removal, the paintings acquire a quasi-stereoscopic quality. Waves of blue, swaying blades of grass, and swirling clouds come to life where there was once a flat panel, lending a pronounced sense of movement and depth. The variations in relief also shift the way light reflects across the panel, providing the works a subtle luminosity and a sense of being in flux.
The result is paintings that reward sustained looking, revealing new relationships as the eye moves across their complex layers. Distinctions between foreground and background, part and whole, and the familiar and unknown become fluid. In this way, Harrison opens up multiple ways of seeing within a single work, echoing nature’s capacity to resist complete understanding.
Connie Harrison (b.1993, Britain; lives and works in London, UK) received a BA with Honors from the Chelsea College of Arts in 2016. She has had solo exhibitions with Luce Gallery, Turin, IT; Informality Gallery, London, UK; Blue Shop Gallery, London, UK; and Arusha Gallery, Edinburgh, UK. Select group exhibitions were held with Nino Mier Gallery, New York, NY, US; Palmer Gallery, London, UK; Luce Gallery, Turin, IT; Lbf contemporary, London, UK; Grove Collective, London, UK; Flowers Gallery, London, UK; and Unit 1 Gallery, London, UK.