Artists in the News
September 10, 2020
“Movement is a theme in Ancart’s art and in his life—from his decision to immigrate to the United States after art school in Brussels to his breakthrough body of work, a series of drawings he made in the back of his car while on a cross-country road trip, which were later exhibited at the Menil Collection in Houston (some of the pieces for this show was created in Los Angeles, where Ancart temporarily decamped during the Covid-19 pandemic). He compares making his paintings to taking the kind of walk where you don’t chart a course, and on his studio door he’s stenciled the words ‘Grand Flâneur.’ It’s a sort of self-imposed nickname—not, as he puts it, in the ‘19th-century lazy dandy’ sense, but rather as ‘one who walks around and tries to isolate poetic moments out of the everyday urban landscape. I think that’s how I’ve learned to be an artist: walking the streets, not torturing myself in a studio.’”
Read the full interview in T, The New York Times Style Magazine
Image: Harold Ancart in his studio, Brooklyn. Photo by Aundre Larrow
