Gwen Hardie was born and educated in Scotland and lived and worked in London and Berlin before settling in New York City in 2000. Represented in many private and public art collections in Europe and America, Hardie was the youngest living artist ever to be given a solo show at The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh in 1990. In 1997 her painting was awarded a prize at the John Moore’s biennial, Liverpool and was included in “the New British Painting”, which toured America in 1986. She left Scotland in 1984 when awarded a DAAD Scholarship to study with Georg Baselitz in Berlin. Following on from her show in June at the RSA in Edinburgh, this will feature a group of paintings, together with a film that takes place in her studio in Brooklyn, NY by the award-winning film-maker Charlotte Lagarde. The paintings will be ovals and tondos, all representing a small portion of the skin, lit by the sun.
Gwen Hardie’s work engages with figuration and the act of perception. She first gained attention with her large scale tightly cropped portraits of women. Her magnifications of skin lit by natural light resemble light effects in the landscape and micro/macro views of cells/earth. Observing from life, she employs aspects of classical painting and color theory to render a lifelike presence. Intimate and monumental, the body-image shifts back and forth perceptually between an atmospheric illusion and a thing of gravity, real and tangible.
Her work was recently shown at The RSA in Edinburgh and The RHA in Dublin and will be in “Territories Unknown” at The Castle Gallery, New Rochelle, New York in spring 2013. She has been awarded a fellowship at The Constance Saltonstall Foundation, Ithaca, New York for Summer 2012.