Gwen Hardie has
distilled her fascination with the human figure, down to its surface and what
lies just beneath. Zeroing in on the flesh, these latest paintings could be
anywhere you see a sprinkling of freckles and the undercurrent of veins, Hardie
has abandoned previous anatomical landmarks—glimpses of an areola or telltale
crease, and so removed all vestiges of narrative and psychological overtones.
Several years ago,
Hardie settled on using tondos and oval shapes for her work because the squares
and rectangles she had been using invited the viewer to mentally add on more,
mosaic-fashion, to the composition. Circles and ovals are self-contained
shapes, which your mind accepts as complete. They’re also sensual and feminine
and reference the alpha and omega of nature from the cosmos all the way down to
cells.
There is a
distinctive volupté quality that comes from the consummate fleshiness Hardie
depicts—one can sense the warmth, softness and pliancy of the skin—yet these
paintings are also rather dispassionate formal opuses into how light and shadow
plays on the surface of things and the manipulation of volume and spatial
direction.
Hardie’s work will
be part of REALITY: Modern and Contemporary Painting, Sainsbury Centre,
Norwich, UK (September 27, 2014 – March 1, 2015), a survey of the last 50 years
of representational painting which includes other art world luminaries as
Lucien Freud, Cecily Brown, Jenny Saville and Peter Doig.