About the Exhibit - Traveling Light

Traveling Light is Harold Ancart’s second exhibit with David Zwirner Gallery, this time at their Chelsea location, 525 & 533 West 19th Street, on view until October 17th. 

“On view in one gallery space will be a new series of paintings that depicts trees. These works were painted between Ancart’s Brooklyn studio and a makeshift outdoor studio in Los Angeles, which he traveled to during lockdown.” (source)

“Pointing to references as varied as René Magritte, Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt, and Piet Mondrian, who approached this subject matter in distinct ways, Ancart’s tree paintings blur form and color, figure and ground, and figuration and abstraction.” (source)

“The exhibition’s title is a triple entendre that references Ancart’s preferred mode of travel (carry-on only); his effort to shed the “heavy luggage” of art historical precedent in his work; and the physics of how light carries color from a painting’s surface to the eye.” - The New York Times (source) 

“The exhibition constructs an immersive landscape experience, and together, the works on view comprise a meditation on the expansive possibilities of painting.”

“I think that’s how I’ve learned to be an artist: walking the streets, not torturing myself in a studio.” - Harold Ancart (source) 

“Once you free your mind from painting having to be a certain way, you can do anything you want, that’s called freedom. That’s what they can’t teach you at school. You have to find it for yourself.” - Harold Ancart (source) 

About the Artist - Harold Ancart 

Harold Ancart was born in Brussels and received his MFA at École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Visuels de la Cambre. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. 

“When you’re a creative person you never stop. You’re probably a creative person when you dream.” - Harold Ancart (source) 

He has artworks in the most prestigious museum including but not limited to the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles.