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October 26, 2007 4:05 pm
The figures and forms in Kay Harwood’s multi-scale paintings have the chilly yet delicate beauty of etchings in ice. Though the London-based artist renders dreamy girls, dainty objects, and woodland animals with almost photo-realist exactitude, her depictions intentionally lack a sense of life. Ironically, this quality gives Harwood’s art a more immediate and haunting quality that a livelier painting of a pretty girl cavorting in nature might lack. Harwood culls inspiration from collages she makes of vintage fashion editorials, Victorian portrait painting, landscape scenes, and yellowed family photographs. In her second solo show, “A Minor Place,” which opens at London’s Museum 52 today, she presents work such as “French Interior,” in which two young women wearing 1930’s garb look disaffected in a room overlooking a strangely tinted landscape. It’s part fashion spread, part fragment of a dream—and strikingly topical for our retro-obsessed era.
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