Press Release
Julian Hatton
Pollen Path
April 15 – May 27, 2023
Catalog available
Elizabeth Harris gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by Julian Hatton. This will be his 13th solo show with the gallery.
The title of the show, “Pollen Path”, was inspired by accounts of a Navajo ritual invoking spiritual and practical guidance. The image of pollen so thick it forms a path is an appropriate metaphor for a painter, guided intuitively by nature and inner vision.
As David Brody points out in his provocative catalog essay, “…when Julian Hatton began haunting shaggy precincts of Prospect Park with a portable easel and paint-smeared messenger bag in the mid-1980s, he was very much off on his own guerrilla tangent.” What Hatton instinctively discovered, and other painters were later to recognize, was the sheer joy of responding to natural forms, and the “why not?” aspect of making that response, as well as a pictorial design, the subject of painting.
Once a plein air painter, Hatton now creates his effulgent imagery entirely in the studio, drawing on limitless sources of inspiration, from hikes in Death Valley, California, to Old Master paintings in the Prado. This new body of work demonstrates a more flexible and dynamic interpretation of what abstract landscape painting can be. Beyond surface frisson and technical painterly flair, these imaginary narratives weave landscape vistas, calligraphic doodles, and animistic caricature with colors both intense and hard to name, as David Brody suggests in the catalog essay. Hatton finds meaning and satisfaction in all of it; his landscape abstractions manifest his experience of the world.
Julian Hatton’s work is in the contemporary collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Addison Gallery of American Art and numerous corporate and private collections including Citibank, Alliance-Bernstein, and the Steve Wynn Collection. He is the recipient of numerous awards including the Award in Art from the American Academy of Arts And Letters, grants from the Pollock Krasner Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. His work has been reviewed in publications ranging from the New York Times to Art in America. Teaching experience includes the Rhode Island School of Design and lecturing at colleges and residencies.
The gallery is located at 529 West 20th Street, 6th floor, and is open Tuesday through Saturday 12-6.
For further information contact Miles Manning at 212-463-9666.