Joseph Hart

StatementCVExhibitions

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Joseph Hart works primarily on paper, incorporating a variety of approaches and materials including painting, drawing and cut paper-collage. He creates visual moments that are alternatively calm and chaotic, hard and soft, that push, pull and create other forms of tension that ultimately lead to awkward yet resolved configurations. Layering color and marks, folding, cutting, editing, destroying and building back up the image play essential roles in his studio practice. Hart's approach is very controlled at times and loose during others, creating a diverse set of gestures that explore compositional hierarchies, boundaries and incidental versus articulated mark making.

 

Hart sites “over-thinking it” as both destructive and critical to his practice. Works often deemed too tight, contrived, disastrous, or other, are disassembled and recycled into newer pieces, transforming the ghosts of failure into important moments of discovery and intrigue. Hart relies heavily on this act of revitalization. This system of working capitalizes on the unscripted, can simplify the complex, and champions micro exchanges between intentions and actualities, blemish and beauty, vice and virtue. 

 

Joseph Hart earned his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and in 2014 he was a Dieu Donné Workspace Residency Fellow. He has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions at Halsey McKay Gallery, NY; Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, NY; David Krut Projects, NY; The Bronx Museum of Art, NY; Galerie Vidal Saint-Phalle in Paris, FR; Galleri Tom Christofferson, DK; and the Frans Masareel Center, BE; amongst others. His work is featured in the public collections at The Davis Museum at Wellesley College, MA; RISD Museum, RI; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY. He is represented by Halsey McKay Gallery in East Hampton, NY. 

Joseph Hart; Untitled, 2015; graphite on paper; 8 1/2 x 11 in.