Brian Harte at Tatjana Pieters

Artist: Brian Harte

Exhibition title: House Rules

Venue: Tatjana Pieters, Ghent, Belgium

Date: June 24 – August 21, 2022

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Tatjana Pieters

Brian Harte works primarily as a painter, creating stark and cinematic images of domestic scenes. Harte balances energetic painterly abstraction with tightly composed interiors, taking conceptual cues from diverse cultural figures as Franz Kafka, Philip Guston, The Brothers Quay, and Albert Oehlen. One of the key features of Brian Harte’s paintings is his bold use of color and the undetermined state of the depicted figures, midway between sketchy and finished. The viewer’s eye travels through the richly detailed and chaotic spaces on the large canvases, slowly finding familiar elements that may not be noticed at first glance. In his work, Harte explores the relationship between abstraction and figuration, between the sketchy and the finished, a process that resonates with the tradition of British painting.

Brian Harte (IR, 1978) lives and works in Thurles, Ireland. Harte’s work is currently on view at WHAT Museum, Tokyo (JP) and ‘Generation 2022: New Irish Painting, Butler Gallery (IR). Recent solo exhibitions include ‘8 Paintings ( from the midlands ), MAKI Gallery, Tokyo (JP), ‘Endless Worlds’, Annarumma Gallery, Napoli (IT), ‘Everything you touch’, GNYP Gallery, Berlin (DE), ‘Subbuteo’, These Days, Los Angeles (USA), ‘Table Manners’, Jan Forbes Gallery, Malibu (USA) and ’This Life Domestic’, Ever Gold [Projects], San Francisco (USA). Harte is part of multiple public and private collections, including OKETA Collection in Japan, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg in Germany and Bank of Ireland. He is represented by Simchowitz Gallery in Los Angeles (USA), GNYP Gallery in Berlin (DE) and MAKI Gallery in Tokyo (JP).