Rebecca Harper 'Chameleon' - Online Exhibition Catalogue

Rebecca Harper
Chameleon

Rebecca Harper
Chameleon

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On Chameleons and Urban Nomads:
The Paintings of Rebecca Harper
The extensive scale and the exhilarating
vibrancy of colour of Harper’s works
mesmerise. Permeated with immediacy,
evocative at once of an Instagram story
and Bonnard’s rendition of Impressionism,
their insouciant charm draws in and
captivates. The artist eschews narrative
descriptions, relying on the relationship
between pictorial elements to convey
meaning. Far from austere, the settings
of her works with all their verdant
splendour, however, do not swamp the
viewer. There is no over-embellishment or
unnecessary detail.
In this sense, Harper’s paintings share
a formal resonance with works of the
French fin de siècle and early twentieth
century decorators, preoccupied with the
‘true art of painting’. According to the
critic G.-Albert Aurier, painting could be
created only to ‘decorate with thoughts,
dreams, and ideas the banal walls of
human edifices.’ He maintained that the
easel-picture was nothing but an illogical
refinement invented to satisfy the fantasy in
decadent civilisations. Working on a large
scale allows Harper to truly connect with
her process, to create paintings marked by
a palpable physical depth.
This show at Anima Mundi highlights the
body of work created between 2017 and
2019. With their strong visual vocabulary,
the paintings tap into the prevailing
mood of the artist’s generation with its
wistful introspection and nostalgia for the
ostensibly simpler past. Her subjects are
frequently observed outdoors – Harper
tends to execute a series of preparatory
drawings, which later allow her to distil
the final image. Her work, however, is
informed in equal part by the tropes and
clichés of contemporary cultures. Harper
interweaves the elements of form and
colour to create a concentrated rendering
of reality, without losing any of the
genuine spontaneity.
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Exploring the acute self-awareness of
social media culture, Harper exposes the
dichotomy between private feeling and
public profile. Her subjects are captured
in what seem to be holiday snapshots
imbued with lyricism and subtle humour.
The young running men in Swamped (2018)
recall simultaneously the Panathenaic
amphora athletes and the archetypal Three
Graces depicted in a primaeval forest.
Lithe and nimble, they are at one with
nature – the unity, which in art history is
traditionally reserved for women. In her
Clambering Rock Pools (2018), the artist
wittily subverts yet another anachronism,
namely the female bather. Contrary to the
convention of the genre, the women in
Harper’s painting are not reduced to the
static embodiment of beguiling beauty.
They are, in fact, uncompromisingly real.
Negotiating awkwardly the mossy rocks of
a distant island, her bathers do not radiate
docility or coyness and appear entirely
uninterested in their outward image, much
too preoccupied with finding whatever it is
they seem to look for.
Most of these subjects are urban nomads;
global citizens with itinerant lifestyles,
traversing continents and cultures with
remarkable nonchalance. The continuous
recasting of these characters allows the artist
to examine the phenomenon of mobility in
different societies. Existing in a multiplicity
of forms and dimensions, including bodies,
objects, and ideas, migration has been seen,
for some time, as an intrinsic and necessary
part of modern life. Yet with increased
discussion of ‘migration crises’ and changing
patterns of cross-cultural interactions,
issues of belonging and acceptance – and
so, too, those of freedom of movement –
seem to be gaining new significance in
Europe and North America. Through her
subtle and thoughtful works, Harper raises
a probing and troubling question: at which
point does personal freedom become a
societal problem?
Dzmitry Suslau, 2019
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Guys Hanging Out At The Lilly Ponds
acrylic on canvas | 160 x 200 cm
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Hanging By A Scaffold
acrylic on canvas | 180 x 220 cm
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Cinema (Between Two Worlds)
acrylic on canvas | 180 x 215 cm
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Clambering Rock Pools
acrylic on canvas | 180 x 225 cm
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Clambering Heights
acrylic on canvas | 175 x 160 cm
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Camouflage at the Edge
acrylic on canvas | 80 x 80 cm
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Gems
acrylic on canvas | 80 x 80 cm
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Amphibious
acrylic on canvas | 80 x 80 cm
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Cafe Frappe
acrylic on canvas | 200 x 175 cm
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Insight
acrylic on canvas | 180 x 250 cm
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To Tell It All With A Crystal Ball
acrylic on canvas | 150 x 130 cm
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Urban Nomads
acrylic on canvas | 140 x 120 cm
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Half Flight
acrylic on canvas | 175 x 120 cm
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Swamper
acrylic on canvas | 180 x 250 cm
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Peckham High Street
acrylic on canvas | 165 x 390 cm
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Dreaming of Another World
acrylic on canvas | 180 x 220 cm
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Exile
acrylic on canvas | 180 x 180 cm
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Rebecca Harper was born in London in 1989 where she still currently livesand works.
Her paintings, a rich combination of large and smaller scale works on canvas and studies on paper,
are underpinned by intense virtuosic drawing. Her technique demonstrates a mode of reconstructing
visual appearance; events, beliefs, dreams, memory and mediated imagery, whereby seamless,
sometimes fictional fragmentations are rearranged and presented as plausible events.
The diasporic condition presents itself in her paintings as an unfolding allegoric commentary.
The works are a contemplation of transience, a theatre in which human instinct compassionately
addresses ideas of settlement, (the fixed image) a reaction to one’s transient restlessness and
displacement and a complex dispersion of un-at-homeness and groundlessness. Her often large
scale works allow for ‘paintings’ potential to play voyeur, allowing distance enough to play the
narrator without a need for the images to be fixed, settled or stable. The motives of her works are
intended to be contradictory, at once both particular and general, restrained and ornate, whole and
fragmented, detectable and imperceptible, relatable and distant, reflecting the complex duality of
the human condition.
Harper studied at UWE Bristol from 2008-2011, The Royal Drawing School from 2012-2014 and
Turps Art School from 2016-2018. Since 2014 she has taught, through the Royal Drawing School
at various institutions including The Saatchi Gallery, The V&A Museum of Childhood, Cass Arts,
Drawing School Central/Selfridges, The Southbank centre, The National Gallery; She was awarded
The Michael Moritz residency Tuscany and The Modi Institute of Fine Art, India 2014.
Harper is represented in both private and public collections including the Royal Collections,
The Ruth Borchard Collection and the Ullens Collection. She has exhibited in numerous group
shows including Christies London and New York and most recently been included in Bloomberg
New Contemporaries 2018. She has also exhibited at ‘Artist of the Day’ at Flowers Gallery 2018,
Supersimetrica Art Fair, The Pie Factory / Turner Contemporary - Turner show in Margate and
The Turps Gallery London. She is currently Artist in Residence for the Ryder Project at A.P.T in
Deptford and recently won the ACS (Artists Collecting Society) Studio Prize 2018.
Rebecca Harper is represented by Anima Mundi

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Published by Anima-Mundi to coincide with Rebecca Harper ‘Chameleon’
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