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Sep 17 – Oct 8, 2022
Newzones is pleased to present Flow State, a solo exhibition of new work from Canadian abstractionist Bradley Harms. Advancing ideas within abstraction has always been central in Bradley Harms practice. For the past number of years, Harms has been on the front lines of the new wave of Canadian abstraction, building upon traditions within the medium, while creating work that both reflects and critiques contemporary social and technological developments. Harms describes Flow State as ‘an appropriate term for the total immersion that one can access when viewing abstract painting. It is also a bit of cheeky insight as to how these works were created.’ The majority of the paintings created for Flow State rely upon the viscosity of paint in a delicate dance of flow and control; a volley between method and imagination, structure and illusion. These new paintings gently jive clichéd Modernist tropes in an ironic critical posture, aimed at parsing painting’s language, its authority, history, and affiliations. Harms’ artistic practice continues to focus on creating contemporary objects with seams and edges that are confident and exacted. The surfaces are painted with mechanical conviction. They are slick as well as sincere, diagrammatic as well as sensual. The artist’s contemplation of Modernism is transferred into a more frighteningly contemporary construct. Born in 1970, Winnipeg, Bradley Harms received his BFA from the University of Calgary in 1996 and his Masters of Fine Arts from the prestigious School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2004. Harms has exhibited extensively throughout Canada, as well as on the international stage, including Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Miami, Europe, Munich, Sydney, Singapore, and Tokyo. His artwork can be found in many public collections such as the Canada Council’s Art Bank (Ottawa, ON), Alberta Foundation for the Arts (Edmonton, AB), the Nickle Arts Museum (Calgary, AB), University of Western Sydney (Sydney, Australia), Foreign Affairs + International Trade Canada (Ottawa, ON) and Glenbow Museum (Calgary, AB), to name a few.
Artworks
