Gabriel Hartley

“When I made Pout I was thinking about modernist painting, African masks, and modes of abstraction. I really enjoy the energy of ‘primitivism’, but these things feel so familiar now they’re quite difficult to use. I wanted to make it feel new again, like how it was perceived in the first place: raw and dynamic. I started painting and different connotations came up, like Max Ernst and Miro’s tapestries; it’s about appropriation in some ways. I make a lot of sculpture and think about painting in a sculptural way. The work has lots of different layers and the paint becomes a material like plaster or something. I use a lot of spray paint with the oil, this gives a light source and shows the different excavations within the paint; it brings out the different layers that have been masked or covered up. I don’t usually work in grey scale, but I was thinking of totemic sculpture or tribal masks, something quite sombre and grand. It’s how we look at images of these things: in black and white photographs and old books.”