Henry Ward – Bethany

Henry Ward (b.1971) is an artist, educator and writer based in London. This monograph documents a major new body of work created during and following a residency at the Josef & Anni Albers Foundation in Bethany, Connecticut, in 2023, and a subsequent residency in the Morvan, Burgundy, in summer 2024. Ward is interested in line, shape, form and colour relationships. He works primarily as a painter, but also makes drawings and small sculptures. He explores the language of paint by investigating the threshold between abstraction and representation. During the two months he spent at the Albers Foundation, Ward took advantage of the vast studio space and began pinning together cut painted pieces to make assemblages. While there, he produced fifteen paintings on canvas and wood, forty paintings on paper, sixty drawings, twenty ‘cut-outs’ and a full sketchbook. Exclusively working with acrylic paints, he began experimenting, using masking tape and mixing in different mediums so that he could ‘push the paint around’.The publication includes reproductions of many the works Ward made during his stay at the Albers Foundation, organised into ‘Paintings’, ‘Works on Paper’ and ‘Drawings’. The final section, ‘After Bethany’, brings together twenty-two acrylic paintings on canvas that the artist created the following year, including during a two-week residency in France. In his foreword, Fritz Horstman, Education Director of the Albers Foundation, sets the scene in Bethany, detailing the studio buildings and the rural winter landscape, as well as Ward’s ‘exciting path of exploration and growth’ during his time there. While in residence, Ward travelled to nearby New York to meet the artist Amy Sillman in her Brooklyn studio. An edited transcript of their conversation is included here, in which they discuss their individual approaches to painting, writing and language. In his essay, the curator and writer Jonathan Watkins charts Ward’s thirty-year career as an artist and teacher, drawing out his belief that ‘art is, by its very nature, educational’. In her contribution, Jenni Lomax interviewed Ward in his Woolwich studio about the works he created during both residencies, and the lasting impact they have had on his practice.Edited by Matt Price and designed by Joe Gilmore, the book is published by Anomie Publishing, London.Henry Ward (b.1971) is an artist, educator and writer based in London. Ward has exhibited nationally and internationally for over thirty years. He was shortlisted for the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize in 2018, 2019 and 2022 and was included in the Wells Art Contemporary in both 2020 and 2024. Ward has shown in numerous group exhibitions including with Flowers Gallery, London, Messums London and Sid Motion Gallery, London. In 2024 his solo exhibition Medusa & Other Stories, with Kittoe Contemporary, won the Artlogic best exhibition award at the London Art Fair.

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