Spencer Harrison: Lyrical Metrical: Salon Projects

Spencer Harrison: Lyrical Metrical is the second exhibition in the new Salon Project series, where artists are invited to nominate an artist to present work in the gallery Salon, alongside their own solo exhibition. Bryan Spier has invited Spencer Harrison. 

Harrison's Lyrical Metrical is a series of new abstract paintings that draw on the formal properties of poetry as a basis for investigating the experience of colour. Each vibrant composition creates a heightened experience of colour, exploring its capacity to activate a range of emotion and intensity of experience in a way that is similar to poetry.

Within these works, Harrison references the linear structures of poetry, as well as ideas of alliteration, rhyme and metrical rhythm; creating 'Colour Poems' in paint that capture the rhythmic energy of poetry as colour and form. The vibrant chords of colour contained in each painting draw on the artist's extensive knowledge of the colour theories of Johannes Itten and Josef Albers. Just as poetry experiments with language, these paintings experiment with the language of colour: making unexpected juxtapositions that trigger a fine balance between dissonance and harmony. Colours appear to merge, vibrate and shift in hue as they interact before the viewers' eyes.

SPENCER HARRISON has an interdisciplinary practice concerned with the dialogue between formal abstraction and a complex modern world. His work explores the visual languages of the world around us, borrowing forms and colours and repurposing them to create enigmatic abstract works. He is particularly interested in the emotional affect of colour and how abstraction allows for the distillation of complex ideas into reduced minimalist form. Over the past six years Harrison has presented several solo exhibitions, as well as working on public murals and commissions. He is currently undertaking a Masters of Contemporary Art at the Victorian College of Arts, Melbourne.