SELECTED WORKS BY Marcus Harvey
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Marcus Harvey
Golden Showers
1993
acrylic on canvas
244 x 244 cm |
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Combining the unlikely styles of hard-edged graphics and painterly abstraction, Marcus Harvey’s Golden Showers draws from the aesthetic associations of expressionism and pop. Capturing the violent energy of De Kooning’s women, Harvey sets his canvas in the field of psychological self-consciousness, pervading the image with unrestrained emotion. Overlaid with a sexy stylised outline reminiscent of Patrick Caulfield, Harvey’s painting balances between idealised glamour and guttural instinct. |
Marcus Harvey
Julie From Hull
1994
oil and acrylic on canvas
244 x 244 cm |
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Taking his images sources from home-brew porn magazine Reader’s Wives, Marcus Harvey’s early canvases use paint as a means to explore the concept of excess. Replicating smutty urgency, Harvey’s Julie from Hull is bathed in frenzied gushy pink, a dirty allurement promising fleshy debauchery. Using a heavy black line over a thick expressionist ground, Harvey’s graphic form becomes both container and barrier of over-indulgence, the promise of gratification monumentalised and ever distant. |
Marcus Harvey
My Arse is Yours
1993
oil on canvas
213 x 213 cm |
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Through his paintings Marcus Harvey explores pornography as a phenomenon of frustration. Using the instantaneity of paint, Harvey builds his canvases up as raw explosions, his brushwork capturing the urgency and sheer physicality of sexual fixation. Tracing over his gestures with images taken from top-shelf zines, Harvey places his desire in the teasing world of pop, uniting detached graphic image and aggrandised emotion as a parody of media portrayal and Pavlovian response. |
Marcus Harvey
Readers Wife I
1993
oil on canvas
213 x 213 cm |
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Depicted with the stark outlines of graphic arts and instructional manuals, Marcus Harvey’s x-rated reproductions become neutral instigators of interpretive response. Empty and generic, they offer sex as a commodified banality onto which all manner of fantasy is projected. Placed over highly emotive backgrounds, Harvey activates these images with tragic-comic fervour. The crotch-shot in Reader’s Wife 1 conveys all the excitement and pathos of amateur porn: clumsy, naïve, and filthy to the core, Harvey’s painterly response both mimics and exceeds pornographic expectation. |
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ARTIST INFORMATION
Marcus Harvey's BIOGRAPHY
1963
Born in Leeds
Currently lives and works in London
SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2005
Marcus Harvey, Mimmo Scognamiglio, Naples
The Führer's Cakes, Galleria Marabini, Bologna
2002
Marcus Harvey, Mary Boone Gallery, New York
Marcus Harvey, Vedovi Fine Art, Brussels
1996
Marcus Harvey, Vedovi Fine Art, Brussels
1995
Marcus Harvey, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York
1994
Snaps, White Cube, London
1993
Marcus Harvey, Cohen Gallery, New York
GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2005
London Calling. Young British Artists Criss-Crossed, Galleri Kaare Berntsen, Oslo
2002
Closer, Standpoint Gallery, London
2001
Happy the World so Made, The Nunnery, London
2000
MoMa. A Thick Bloke Kicking a Dog to Death, The International 3 Summer Fête, Fairfield, Manchester
Sex and the Britsh, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Salzburg; Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris
Out There, White Cube2, Hoxton, London
1999
Now It's My Turn to Scream. Works by Contemporary British Artists from the Logan
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