Andrew Pierre Hart has debuted 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 Gallery 1957 in Accra, Ghana and each artwork is infused with the multiple layers that have been part of the artist’s experience. Hart’s practice centres experimentation and improvisation and continually draws inspiration from the cross modality of painting and sound. ‘The Listening Sweet II Ghana’ builds on the undulating forms and figures that exist within his sonic mythology and expands their lore with site specific 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 beings. 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. ‘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 a channel 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 someone passionate about music himself, 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 his birthplace London, his ancestral home Barbados and his adopted artistic home 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. ‘The Listening Sweet II Ghana’ is open until the 11th of January 2024.
