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Lot Essay
Harold Ancart’s treatment of form is immediately reminiscent of Clyfford Still’s lightning strike brushwork, his measured and meticulous approach to the background often brings to mind the famed “zips” of Barnett Newman or faraway horizon lines. By juggling the visual vocabularies of abstract and landscape painting, the artist creates a tense and elegantly complex balance of frenzy and stasis.
The present lot, an Untitled triptych from 2014, is a lyrical and expansive example of Ancart’s painting. Alternately thick and thin bands of black bisect the white fields of each composition, their rhythms interrupted as the eye moves from one sheet to the next. Bursts of color lifted from the spectrum of a lollipop hover in the foreground, arrested mid-explosion. With each sheet measuring six feet high and four feet wide, the work is heroic in scale. The overall visual character is similar to a massive contact sheet of roughly handled film, its imperfections embellished with fragments from a rainbow.
The present lot, an Untitled triptych from 2014, is a lyrical and expansive example of Ancart’s painting. Alternately thick and thin bands of black bisect the white fields of each composition, their rhythms interrupted as the eye moves from one sheet to the next. Bursts of color lifted from the spectrum of a lollipop hover in the foreground, arrested mid-explosion. With each sheet measuring six feet high and four feet wide, the work is heroic in scale. The overall visual character is similar to a massive contact sheet of roughly handled film, its imperfections embellished with fragments from a rainbow.