HALSEY MCKAY GALLERY

HALSEY MCKAY GALLERY is pleased to present CHUD SILO, a solo exhibition of new paintings and drawings by New York-based artist, Joseph Hart. This is the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.

Hart’s work is a collision of choreographed and happenstance mark-making, ferocious editing and reinvention. Utilizing the tenets of drawing and painting, Hart’s process is structured around cursory gestures: errant dashes, ticks, scrawls, swoops and zigzags. This set of preliminary and exploratory maneuvers are then built upon, reconfigured or impulsively edited out until a composition begins to emerge. The results are abrupt but retain a compelling and provocative elegance.

CHUD SILO will feature a suite of new works that emphasize Hart’s continued interest in compositional management and the paradoxical exchanges between strategy and chance. Large-scale paintings, often made by grafting together multiple smaller works, feature areas of subtle color dominated by sharp slashes in black and white paint, seamed intersections, and a network of glitchy textures and layers. These substantial and severe paintings are contrasted by graceful, door-sized drawings that showcase Hart’s calligraphic and wayward line work. Whereas the paintings are brutal, the drawings are ethereal, striking a sharp distinction in feeling and effect.

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 (b. 1976, New Hampshire) is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design and a 2014 Dieu Donné Workspace Residency Fellow. He has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions at Halsey McKay Gallery, Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, David Krut Projects and The Bronx Museum of Art in New York, Galerie Vidal Saint-Phalle in Paris, Galleri Tom Christofferson in Denmark, and the Frans Masareel Center in Belgium, amongst others. His work is featured in the public collections at The Davis Museum at Wellesley College, RISD Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY. Hart lives and works in New York City.