Andrew Hardwick Public Solo Exhibition at the Renowned Atkinson Gallery

Andrew Hardwick has a public solo exhibition of paintings at the Atkinson Gallery, Millfield, Somerset. The Atkinson is nationally recognised and holds major contemporary art exhibitions which are open to the general public. Previous exhibitors include Andy Warhol, Albert Irvin OBE, Sir Anthony Caro, Lynn Chadwick CBE, Gillian Ayres, Don McCullin, Graham Crowley, Marc Quinn, Dame Elisabeth Frink, Sophie Ryder, Peter Randall-Page, Doug Cocker, Glynn Williams, Anthony Green, Tom Wood, Basil Beattie, Clyde Hopkins and Terry Frost.

Hardwick’s presentation speaks of the surrounding landscape of his home / studio, based on farmland where the River Severn meets the sea on the edge of Bristol, a landscape now surrounded by docks, industry and new housing estates. These selected works are imbued with a sense of narrative of this landscape which simultaneously recalls his childhood wanderings coalescing with his adult observations. Communicated to the viewer through layers of board, canvas, netting, wire and various paints, often discarded in skips, supported by battens, which offer a purposely warped structure to the work which is not confined by the rectangle format.

These works protrude and recess, creating an undulating surface with gouged out negative spaces and artefacts embedded in the surface. Through his paintings, Hardwick aims to give the viewer an experience of the landscape, to evoke emotion and a tangible reality in its raw form. His large-scale diptychs and triptychs will draw you away from the white space of the gallery wall and into their complex surfaces and layers.

Hardwick’s layering process creates a tension within the works, which reflect this beloved and memory soaked landscape being bi-sected by the M5 motorway and then by the Royal Portbury Dock. The paintings depict edge land zones of strange waste land. The titles are direct and descriptive for example “Late Light, October, Somerset Coast”, leaving the viewer to project their own experience onto the work. This frankness creates an elusiveness which gives a sense of ‘negative capability’, a term used by Keats when talking about Shakespeare's poetry: that the imminence of his work laid in his ability to let things that were mysterious to remain just that. 

 
Andrew Hardwick’s exhibition at the Atkinson Gallery runs from 4 November until 7 December 2019. 

 For more information on the exhibition click here

 
For more information on Andrew Hardiwick click here