OSCAR HART VISUAL ARTIST
ARTIST
& PRINTMAKER
About The Artist
Education:
2018 - 2021 OSCAR STUDIED HIS BA IN FINE ART AT THE CAMBRIDGE SCHOOL OF ART IN CAMBRIDGE, UK.
Exhibitions:
JANUARY 2020 ‘SUBLIMINAL’ RUSKIN GALLERY BALCONY SHOW, RUSKIN GALLERY, CAMBRIDGE, UK.
NOVEMBER 2019 ‘THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING’ MOTION SICKNESS PROJECT SPACE, CAMBRIDGE, UK.
MARCH 2019 ‘REACTION’ CAMBRIDGE ARTWORKS, CAMBRIDGE, UK.
SEPTEMBER 2018 'CAMBRIDGE ORIGINAL PRINTMAKERS BIENNALE' THE PITT BUILDING, CAMBRIDGE, UK.
Artist Profile:
My work derives from photographic and drawn material that I gather in day-to-day life. These photographs usually gravitate towards an architectural form that catches my eye. The strong perspectives and structures become the main features of my paintings, often creating ambiguity and distorting how these buildings are seen. More recently I have begun using Photoshop to edit my photographs and plan the canvases before they exist, which has allowed me to experiment more with my work and speed up my process of making.
The subjects don't have to hold any relevance or relationship to me, the work is more about the materials and processes used, with an aim to critique contemporary painting, old master painting, and explore my place as the artist, within it. I find myself consciously pulling away from being a viewer of my own work as I'm not concerned with aesthetic satisfaction, but with understanding the materials and what they may connote within our society and how this differs within the context of their surroundings.
I owe a great deal to artists such as Anselm Kiefer and Mark Bradford, who over the years have inspired me to begin this exploration of painting and materials, which is spearheading my practice. Currently, my work is existing on the edge of painting and sculpture, and moving in a direction towards abstraction, with just moments of familiarity and figuration.
My practice concerns painting. Through the process of painting, I aim to scrutinize traditional and ‘Old Master’ painting, and inadvertently their connotations within a historical and contemporary context. This is achieved, in part, through the intentional juxtaposition I create between the surface that I paint on, and the traditional painting techniques and mediums that I use in the construction of figurative imagery. By doing this, I aim to investigate the increasingly ambiguous term: ‘painting’ and challenge preconceived notions of what ‘a painting’ can be within a contemporary context.
My work draws attention to the ‘objectness’ of the canvas, as opposed to the painting itself as an autonomous space. This creates friction between the materials used to build the surface, and the painted image. The materials that I use to build these surfaces have a familiarity that is only partly transformed by the paint which creates a sense of Uncanny for the viewer. The materials I use are strongly associated with the social fabric of life and can be found in day-to-day settings such as domestic, public, and urban spaces.