Alex Hartley is a UK based artist whose work destabilises our understanding of both iconic architecture and our connection with nature by exploring utopian possibilities and visions. He employs his practice to test our notions of utopia, the individual, and the critical relationship we have with the environment questioning how we occupy the world’s wild places. Hartley’s practice is wide ranging, comprising wall-based sculptural photographic compositions, film-making, climbing, artist publications, room-sized architectural installations, participatory site-specific works, and ambitious works of land-art.
Earlier work focused on the white cube of the gallery space; testing the parameters of the containers of art. This has evolved to explore iconic modernist architectural forms where buildings are considered as social experiments manifested in both the built and natural environments. Hartley’s work encourages us to consider how we experience and think about our constructed surroundings – through surface and line, scale and materials, locations and contexts. Modernist architecture has been a constant touchstone for Hartley. In recent work he has amplified a sense of narrative, of the viewer having arrived at a situation of ambiguous cause and uncertain outcome.
Alongside Hartley’s gallery practice, he has developed a series of challenging and engaged works taking place in the public realm. The ongoing work Nowhereisland has continued to evolve over more than 15-years and resulted in the formation of a new nation from a previously undiscovered island which Hartley had searched for and found in the High Arctic. Durational works such as Dropper, Vigil, and The Clearing (with Tom James) have all involved the artist and groups of volunteers occupying and living within the artworks. Though travelling to remote places is often a catalyst for his work, the outcome of his investigations become social and relational.
Hartley’s work has been a sustained investigation into iconic modernist and dystopian architecture, solitary habitation and communal living, with the construction of sanctuary as an inherent drive to form refuge from the world. Architectural emblems of the counter culture movement are reconfigured or presented as ruins, alongside classic modernist structures where time has been allowed to run-on and nature take over, in large-scale installations that confuse both place and context.
Similarly, in the long running wall-based series ‘The Houses’ the idea of the boundary is subject to constant re-evaluation – between interior and exterior, private and public space, manmade and natural environments, two and three dimensions, object and image. Narratives of entropy and decay are ever present: as the modern project itself fails, it requires repurposing just as it is being reclaimed by Supernature.
Hartley is represented by the Victoria Miro Gallery, UK