Marie Harnett: Were you dreaming? @ Cristea Roberts Gallery, London

Marie Harnett: Were you dreaming?

Cristea Roberts Gallery, London

2 May – 8 June 2025

MARIE HARNETT

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

www.cristearoberts.com

Marie Harnett @ Cristea Roberts Gallery, London - What Was My Own

Marie Harnett: What Was My Own 

Cristea Roberts Gallery, London 

Through 15 May 2021 

A major exhibition of new works by British artist MARIE HARNETT (b. 1983), capturing fleeting moments of drama, beauty and sus­pense from contemporary film, is on view at Cristea Roberts Gallery, London. What Was My Own features over thirty new highly detailed, meticulous drawings, both large and minute in scale, derived from film stills. A sense of unease and melancholy pervades Marie Harnett’s new work, as we are offered glimpses into scenes that present an emotion or history that is suddenly intimate and familiar to us.

The new drawings, completed last year whilst Marie Harnett was living in both London and Norway, derive from period dramas. Scenes of domesticity, blossoming trees, baskets and platters, abundant with food, figures dancing, laughing and couples embracing are exhibited alongside images of vacant winterscapes, bare trees, extinguished candles, empty rooms, lonely figures and expressions of grief or sadness. Marie Harnett's skillful draughtsmanship and attention to detail sees her focus on every aspect of pose, light and texture of these described moments. Her process requires her to watch film trailers online without sound, frame by frame, until she finds inspiration. She removes the colour and takes the still out of its narrative context, suspending a moment in time.  

In several drawings we appear to be witnessing a pause before or after an event. In What was My Own, 2020, and It’s Exactly as I Planned, 2020, we do not know if figures are turning away from or towards us. Do Not Speak It, 2020, depicts a woman who on first glance appears to be sleeping but the expression on her face indicates grief or pain. The perspective we are offered in each of the drawings suggests we are intruding on the scenes. In Change the World, 2020, a chaotic spectacle depicting a party, goes one step further. This large-scale drawing measuring almost 150 cm wide, which is full of life and energy, does not feature the faces of its figures. They have been obscured or removed completely, suggesting an undertone of darkness and unease.

Marie Harnett continues this theme in new overlap drawings. This involves her taking two stills and superimposing one on top of the other. She uses her source imagery to create a unique image that takes on its own life and a new story. In She Broke the Rules, 2019, a large-scale drawing measuring over 150 cm wide, Marie Harnett presents a couple picnicking in a forest, but not all is as it seems. Marie Harnett comments; “Stills are layered atop each other, building in a false representation. The forest is actually a stage set. The figures are having a picnic, but the overlaying image is snowing. The drawing represents a sense of passing time, misremembering and lost love and pain.” Harnett adds surreal twists to her drawings, which have been inspired by the uncanny.

Marie Harnett’s wider inspirations are drawn from varied sources. She cites Dutch seventeenth-century painting; Vermeer; Rubens; the German Romantics; Baroque painting; swooning figures from eighteenth-century classical art; Degas dancers; and the dreamlike elements from works by Dorothea Tanning and Dora Maar, amongst others, as influences on this new body of work.

What Was My Own is Marie Harnett’s third solo exhibition at Cristea Roberts Gallery. In Summer 2019 Marie Harnett completed a residency at The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Connecticut. Her work will feature in a forthcoming exhibition at Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh. Other recent exhibitions include Städtische Galerie Bietigheim-Bissingen, Germany, and Haugesund Billedgalleri, Haugesund, Norway.

Her works are housed in the permanent collections of British Museum, London; Government Art Collection, London; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh; Edinburgh College of Art, Edinburgh; Städtische Galerie Bietigheim-Bissingen, Germany; Yale Centre for British Art, Connecticut; and Museum of Modern Art, New York.

CRISTEA ROBERTS GALLERY

43 Pall Mall, London SW1Y 5JG

cristearoberts.com

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