London-born Barbadian artist Andrew Pierre Hart debuts his first solo exhibition at Gallery 1957, presenting new paintings, murals and sculptures entitled The Listening Sweet II Ghana.
The exhibition follows a two-month residency with the Gallery in Accra and each artwork is infused with the multiple layers that have been part of Hart’s experience.
The interdisciplinary artist whose practice centres experimentation and improvisation continually draws inspiration from the cross modality of painting and sound. This new body of work builds on the undulating forms and figures existing within his sonic mythology and expands their lore with sitespecific murals that respond to the people and spaces in which the works were created. The larger-than-life characters are from Hart’s ongoing series of work where Sonara and blacqousti, two sonorous deities, beckon audiences on a journey to heal, calling on to humankind to listen.
Hart’s characters pose questions of what it means to listen and to hear, both to the rhythms of the earth and to your fellow human being. The colour palette that bursts from the canvases is inspired by Ghana’s national pride, as signified in a celebration of an all encompassing national flag. Eternally vibrating with undertones of resistance and overtures of celebration, these colours are flown in the nation’s stylistics sensibilities, intermittent protests in an election year, and in the everydayness of being.
Drums are absent in Hart’s work yet are omnipresent in his works – his canvases and the sprawling murals which surround them are similar to a tamalin drum, a square drum that is made in the same way as a stretched painting canvas. Part of the work finds itself caught up in what the artist considers the serious issues of Galamsey illegal mining and the grassroots protests which erupted during the time of his residency in Accra. Hart attended a protest in support of the #StopGalamsey rallies and it is in this the full awareness of the embedding of the drum in all facets of Ghanaian culture - from protest songs to old warrior songs and hymns - that the incessant drumbeat finds its way into the forms and materiality of his site specific context.
The Listening Sweet II Ghana knits together many conceptual parts. Interspersed within the gallery space are robust and rhythmic musical instruments sculpted from wood, reflected in the instruments being played by the musicians within the paintings. Acting as conduit between the paintings and the sculptures, Hart conceives his murals as one-off, freestyle improvs, rendered in pen straight onto a wall without pre-sketches.
These vehement bursts of lines and monochromatic space bend and warp the white cube of the gallery, causing interference that is at once melodious and disruptive. The murals can be seen in many ways as visualisations of sound and rhythm, of graphic scores and cartography, bubbling into the nucleus part of DNA patterns. As a musical aficionado, Hart exposes digital coding and drum patterns while making strong references to Gurunsi hand painted villages in the northern regions of Ghana.
The most prominent ingredient in Hart’s creative lexicon is a flavourful freedom of movement. For Hart, the space between the diasporas of London, Barbados and Accra are connected like the dots in the past, present and future. These knots of histories and relational narratives emerge in disparate ways throughout this effervescent body of work, invoking audiences to slip in and out of time.
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