Marie Harnett: Were you dreaming?
Cristea Roberts Gallery, London
2 May – 8 June 2025
Half agony, half hope, 2024
Graphite on drafting film
Paper: 23 x 30.6 cm / Image: 5.2 x 16.6 cm
© Marie Harnett, courtesy Cristea Roberts Gallery
“What could she say, but that too well he lov’d?”Ovid, Orpheus, Metamorphoses
Cristea Roberts Gallery presents an exhibition of new drawings by MARIE HARNETT (b.1983). Were you dreaming?, the artist’s fourth solo show with the gallery, brings together twenty-five intricate works on paper depicting tender, decadent and dream-like scenes inspired by contemporary film, Greek mythology and Old Master paintings.
Best-known for pencil drawings that are hyper realistic in style, the artist’s practice always begins with film stills sourced from a diverse range of trailers. Films are a conduit for the artist, who sifts through hundreds of trailers, intuitively selecting certain frames that encapsulate a particular atmosphere.
Through this process, Marie Harnett establishes a series of fragmented scenes that allude to classical myth and tragedy; the artist was particularly inspired by the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, lovers separated by death. Although Orpheus persuades Hades, God of the Dead, to allow him to take Eurydice back to the world of the living, he inevitably breaks the terms of their agreement, stealing a final, forbidden glance at Eurydice, causing her to return to the underworld forever.
Harnett’s tableaux of drawings collectively inhabit the same world, forming part of a new narrative, a realm that is not quite our own; a woman is framed in a window, a coin held between her fingers; a man holds the head of a broken statue in his hands; the façade of a building is concealed by thick foliage.
The artist commits these unexpected scenes to paper, imbuing her drawings with drama and suspense. As a result, visitors to the exhibition, become active protagonists, joining into the act of observing and being observed.
Marie Harnett pairs the ancient with the modern, creating what she describes as an “other world, an underworld, a mirror world, that is frozen in time.”
Harnett’s use of graphite collaging in her drawings produces images that are surreal and uncanny; characters from period films are blended and recontextualised with backgrounds sourced from mythological paintings. In for you alone, 2024, a man in modern dress is transposed into the landscape of Orpheus, 1628, by Roelandt Savery.
Drawing inspiration from Baroque and Renaissance sculptors, such as Bernini and Michelangelo, several of the artist’s works, including Half agony, half hope, 2024, depict marble statues that appear in film. Interested by how stone sculptures depict subjects that are seemingly suspended in time, Harnett experiments with the medium of pencil to create the same illusion.
Marie Harnett also presents several drawings that take the form of photographs; in Love has an earlier death, and You’ve cast a spell, 2024, a jelly-like trifle is shown in both positive and negative versions. In these drawings, Harnett experiments with transformation; a film still of a particular object is turned into a photographic negative which, in turn, is made into a drawing. Through this method, Marie Harnett intends to highlight the sculptural quality of drawing, to establish distorted parallels in shades of light and dark.
Harnett’s titles are selected from the audio of the trailers she watches. Through this pairing of image and word Marie Harnett creates a new staging and cast of characters, all connected to pervading themes of loss, love, yearning and grief.
The exhibition is accompanied by a publication featuring an interview with the artist.
Marie Harnett: Were you dreaming? takes place during the 2025 edition of London Gallery Weekend (5 - 8 June 2025), when the artist will be giving a public talk and the show will be open for extended hours.
MARIE HARNETT
Marie Harnett was born in 1983 in Hertfordshire, England. She studied drawing and painting at Edinburgh College of Art, graduating in 2006.
Marie Harnett makes highly detailed, meticulous drawings derived from film stills which capture fleeting moments of drama, beauty and suspense. By removing the stills from their context and reworking them as intricate pencil studies, Harnett focuses on every aspect of pose, light and texture. Harnett also explores these themes in her printmaking, which include large scale linocut prints of images built up from black and white curving lines, which can take up to one month to carve, and a series of mezzotints, which are housed in the permanent collection of the British Museum, London.
Recent solo and group exhibitions include The British Museum, London; Arti et Amicitiae, Amsterdam (2023); Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh (2022); Cristea Roberts Gallery, London (2021, 2017); BcmA, Berlin (2020); Städtische Galerie, Bietigheim-Bissingen; Haugesund Museum of Fine Art, Haugesund (2019); Yale Center for British Art, Connecticut (2017); Theodore: Art, New York, USA (2017); Royal Academy of Arts, London (2023, 2018, 2016); Galerie Rudolfinum, Prague (2016); Bremen Kunsthalle, Bremen (2015) and Galleria Bonomo, Rome (2014). In 2019 Marie Harnett completed a residency at The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Connecticut.
Harnett’s works are held in international public and private collections including British Museum, London; National Galleries Scotland, Edinburgh; Government Art Collection, London; Edinburgh College of Art, Edinburgh; Städtische Galerie Bietigheim-Bissingen; Yale Centre for British Art, Connecticut; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Connecticut; and Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Marie Harnett lives and works in London.
CRISTEA ROBERTS GALLERY
43 Pall Mall, London SW1Y 5JG