Verity Coward
Harangled 1, 2024
Oil on canvas
150 x 187 cm
59 x 73 5/8 in.
59 x 73 5/8 in.
Unique
Courtesy of the artist and Brooke Benington
Harangled 1 is a large-scale oil painting on canvas, where chaotic geometrical forms, drawn from the artist’s temporary papier-mâché models, suggest a portal into her imagined world and a reflection...
Harangled 1 is a large-scale oil painting on canvas, where chaotic geometrical forms, drawn from the artist’s temporary papier-mâché models, suggest a portal into her imagined world and a reflection of the disorder and chaos of our reality. As part of her distinctive creative process, she first builds ephemeral sculptural compositions, which exist only briefly before being translated onto canvas. The papier-mâché models are transformed through their transposition to painting: stripped of their original materiality, they become more abstract and detached from reality. One architectural feature in the painting links itself to helium-inflated sculpture she installed in her exhibition Charismatics, looping the material imagination of the work back into the viewer’s physical space. In doing so, the painting briefly collapses the boundary between reality and representation, creating a kind of visual short circuit.