RICHARD HART

b. 1968. Edinburgh, Scotland

Richard Hart is a Brooklyn based South African artist. Though Hart’s cross-disciplinary work includes collage, printmaking, sculpture, ceramics, video, photography, and installation, he considers himself primarily a painter, though one who’s work defies easy categorization.

At the heart of his work is a sincere engagement with themes of memory, spirituality, ritual, religion and magic, considered through the lens of a sort of idealised vision of Africa and what might be considered Africanness. Hart stages and photographs tableaux of figures engaged in ritual like activities.

These images become source material for paintings, which then become complicated and destabilized as elements within sewn multimedia compositions, incorporating found textiles, screenprints, custom woven imagery and designs, cyanotypes, and abstract studies.

The effect is works that center neither figuration nor abstraction, but seem to actively engage with chance and unexpected juxtapositions, functioning more as inventories of process and fevered artistic exploration, than pure image making. Hart has exhibited broadly, including solo presentations in the US, the UK, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, South Africa and Hong Kong.