Alexander Harrison

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 ...

Various Small Fires (Los Angeles /Dallas /Seoul) began as a series of conversations with artists and curators in Esther Kim Varet’s Venice Beach kitchen while working on her doctoral dissertation. VSF debuted in Hollywood as an official gallery in 2015 with a roster of artists and its current Johnston MarkLee Architects-designed building. The Hollywood gallery contains three exhibition spaces, a unique sound corridor, and an outdoor gallery. VSF’s exhibition program explores several curatorial lines: climate, equality, and an international conversation. The gallery is known for offering artists debut shows, creating intergenerational conversations among the artists on its roster, and solidifying artists’ legacies within art history. In 2019, VSF opened a second location in the Hannam neighbourhood of Seoul, South Korea, followed recently this Spring by VSFs third outpost in Dallas, Texas. While Varet has very personal connections to both locations, they are also superlative art communities. These expansions emphasise the gallery’s commitment to innovation and global dialogue in the twenty-first century. In 2021, VSF became a member of the Art Dealers Association of America (ADAA). ...