INTER-SCENIC - Rupert Hartley
The first solo exhibition in Scandinavia of Rupert Hartley’s series of paintings entitled INTER-SCENIC will be exhibited on the first floor of the Nordic Art Agency from May 12th - June 13th.
In Rupert Hartley’s new paintings he expands on his previously formalistic approach, his repetitions of grids and colour more explicitly alluding to both architecture and landscape, offering the viewer both flat planes and vistas. He considers his paintings a distillation of what he calls ‘the simulated environments and psychogeographies’ of his local environments in the coastal town of Hove where he lives.
Originally painting squares was a way to see colours more clearly in the studio and to use up paints. The coloured squares have become central to his paintings in recent years. An overly familiar trope of art history, Rupert exploits this simplistic form as an open emblem, looking back at art history but also reflecting his own connections to social, environmental and architectural space.
A constant in his work has been an exploration of architecture and city space, an interest he explored in the early 2000’s through walking and mapping art projects across city spaces, and now painting from a studio in Hove he finds connections in his daily use of the city informing how he defines the scale, surface and colour of his work.
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