Keith Harder: Children of Icarus
to
Vernon Public Art Gallery 3228 31 Ave, Vernon, British Columbia V1T 2H3
Keith Harder, "ILL Winds East," 2017
acrylic on canvas, 108" x 78"
Keith Harder’s exhibition titled Children of Icarus brings together two distinct bodies of paintings, both of which directly and indirectly reference aviation and the human condition.
The most recent large-scale paintings in the series titled ILL Winds portray the meteorological phenomena of cloud formations while the small-scale, intimate paintings from the series titled Anamnesis highlight the details of decrepit fuselages of vintage airplanes.
Harder’s work is executed as a highly realistic rendering, yet his work is not an illustration of an object, the natural phenomena, or a portrait of a person. While interested in the natural world, Harder has produced work referencing landscape, still life and portraiture, but the tension in his work is created by what cannot be depicted; it is the context within which each work was created.