Ingleby Gallery
Frieze New York 2018

Kevin Harman was born in Scotland in 1982. His work is based on elements of performance, and an engagement with found materials and environments. His Skips series is an ongoing project where he seeks out a skip or dumpster on a Friday night – full of the week’s rubbish from a building site – after the labourers have clocked-off for the weekend. Working tirelessly for the next 48 hours, he sorts and categorises the detritus by colour and material and carefully returns the contents to the skip, accordingly arranged into an oddly formal (and often beautiful) sculpture. The point of his herculean endeavour is not just the sculpture that results but the reveal; the moment when the building crew returns on Monday morning to see their, supposedly familiar, environment transformed into something that defies explanation, and which in due course they will have to destroy in order to continue working.

Harman’s glassworks are positioned somewhere between painting and sculpture. These abstractions are at once seductively beautiful and challengingly physical. They too have their origins in a found object (in this case double-glazing units) which the artist splits in order to pour, layer and drip household paint onto the interior cavity. The resulting images balance the artist’s intentions with moments of chance, and a sense of the final object being something entirely new – a window that defies logic, a surface that is simultaneously opaque and flat, but with apparently swimming depths.

To watch a short film about the artist follow the link: https://bit.ly/2J7lcz6