The Spring Auction 2020

A photorealist skyline meets the accentuated tones of the horizon and sea in this Contemporary Cornish landscape by the award-winning artist Kerry Harding. 

Kerry Harding’s landscape paintings are concerned with experience beyond the ordinary. In her practice she relies entirely on process and the manipulation of paint, working and reworking the canvas in an almost unconscious manner until that moment of enlightenment, that sublime moment of sensory response to abstract shape and colour, when the emerging image asserts its own meaning and direction on the artist.

Paralleling, in some ways, the traditions of Romanticism, Harding’s images dismiss any picturesque ideas of the landscape in favour of creating a deeper connection with the viewer. Whilst the landscape around her home inspires her work, she seeks to take us from the familiar to the indefinite, playing with perspective and space in order to achieve some sense of ‘other’ or the sensorially weird.

A previous bias towards abstraction, however, is giving way at present to a noticeable change in technique: formally speaking, her work is becoming more figurative, more hyper-real. Kerry's painting process has slowed, allowing her to engage more intimately with the canvas. Scenes are stiller, and there is a new focus on detailing the landscape.

Kerry Harding is also including Cumulous Pine II in The Spring Auction.

Accolades

BA (Hons), Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, Oxford University, 1994.
MA, Falmouth University Cornwall, 2003.

Awards: NSA Critics Choice, Lemon Street Gallery, Cornwall, 2005.

Selected Exhibitions: The Aborealists, The National Memorial Arboretum, Staffordshire, 2019. Winter at the Byre, The Byre Gallery, Cornwall, 2019. Breath, The Stratford Gallery, Stratford upon Avon, 2019. The Prince's Trust Auction, Highgrove, Gloucestershire, 2019. The Spring Auction, The Auction Collective, London, 2019. Winter, Cornwall Contemporary Gallery, Cornwall, 2018. Sea Fever, The Auction Collective, London, 2018. Hidden Depths, The Byre Gallery, Cornwall, 2018.