David Harrison

David Harrison’s paintings, drawings and sculptures present a world where the natural and supernatural go hand in hand. Harrison's works expand the languages of contemporary painting and sculpture, drawing into play parts of the culture which are often forgotten, buried, discarded or disregarded. The artist employs all that has lain outside of the mainstream of modern art – age-old symbols and fanciful myth, irrational beliefs, traditional genres like landscape, exuberant sexuality, barbed wit, and wonder at the natural world – in order to speak vividly about our own time, and to revivify the disciplines of painting and sculpture.

Harrison’s paintings give shape to a complete imaginative universe akin to those of earlier Romantic visionaries, ripe with references to the natural world and populated by a cast of animals and figures drawn from myths, legends, modern-day politics and from his own biography. While human presence is often revealed to be ignorant, frivolous or destructive, animal and plant life represents good sense and eternal knowledge.

About the Artist

Born in 1954, David Harrison lives and works in London. Harrison's works have been exhibited at venues including Southwark Park Galleries, London, UK (2019); Royal Academy of Art, London, UK (2019); Lungley Gallery, London, UK (2018); Churchgate Gallery, Somerset, UK (2017); Sargent's Daughters, New York, USA (2016), TRAMPS, London, UK (2017, 2014); VeneKlasen/Werner, Berlin, Germany (2012); Vilma Gold, London, UK (2012, 2003); Daniel Reich Gallery, New York, USA (2008); Galeria OMR, Mexico City (2007); the Arts Centre St. Petersburg, Florida (2005); Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, Sunderland, UK (2005); The Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK (2006, 2004); Whitechapel Project Space, London, UK (2004, 2003); Bloomberg Space, London, UK (2004), and Cubitt Gallery, London, UK (2001).