Pipeline launches its programme of six back-to-back exhibitions with British artist, Tommy Harrison (1996, Stockport). Largely self-taught, Harrison is interested in flawing an image and revels in the tensions that exist between the systems of painting and subject.
Harrison begins his process with an established subject from art history or visual culture. Such familiar images as of Old Master canvases or the portraits of iconic literary figures are the essential means by which he investigates the confines of subject. Harrison reimagines these subjects through the lens of a pre-existing framework, rooted in the demands of the canvas itself—its proportions, angles and surface textures. He might fight against or move with the tide of these systems to disrupt and reinvigorate his subject until its very foundation begins to collapse. Compositions are fractured into new geometries and colour palettes are transformed, as Harrison interrogates the way paint behaves and confounds expectations of a once familiar image. And yet, within the incompleteness of his vivid paintings, there is resolution. In many ways this unfolding process recalls the effects of music, like a visual imperfect cadence.
As the first artist participating in Pipeline’s series of six exhibitions using a split gallery space, Harrison presents the artwork String vibrating in the mist (2022) to introduce his practice. The work will be presented online ahead of the opening and will thereafter feature as part of his exhibition.
String vibrating in the mist is a reimagining of a Renaissance painting, depicting one of the thieves crucified beside Jesus Christ. Harrison selected this work as it encapsulates the tension between paint and subject, found and composed imagery, that drives his practice. Belonging to the collection of the Städel Museum, Frankfurt, the original panel was once part of a triptych made in the workshop of Robert Campin in Tournai and considered one of the most important Dutch altarpieces of the fifteenth century.
As one of the most prominent images rooted in art history, the Crucifixion is the perfect subject for Harrison to reconsider within painting. He unsettles the previous logic of the Renaissance panel with a layering technique, which results in an extraordinary new surface texture and configuration of colour, through a haze of green and yellow. Using geometry as a tool to create fractures, Harrison also plays with the composition of the painting, reframing the figure. The result is a thrilling interpretation of his original source, informed by a balance of intuitive and conscious thought.
