Exploring questions of race and personal and universal notions of home, Alexander Harrison creates small-scaled, subtle yet stark acrylic paintings, often placing his subject within the dazzling composition of frames, windows and arches. They often feature recurring symbols, such as fruits, flowers and figures. Harrison’s work is racially charged iconography. His vivid painting Welcome to New York (2019) depicts a Black cowboy taking a bite out of an apple. From inside the apple, a small but sinister worm emerges. Harrison’s trompe l’oeil paintings are at once spacious and claustrophobic, drawing on his experience growing up as a Black man in the American South. The familiarity of rural landscapes and everyday objects becomes twisted in the eerie atmosphere of the artist’s dark surrealism.
Written by Goldsmiths CCA ...
