Kevin Harman

This week’s sequence ends with another artist making work from ordinary materials. Like Kay Rosen’s ‘paint chart’ installations mentioned yesterday, Kevin Harman’s Glassworks use household wall paint, but unlike Kay’s very deliberate selection by colour and name in Kevin’s case it is paint which has been mis-tinted and would otherwise be thrown away. Working with this recycled paint and salvaged double-glazed window units, he makes works that combine the biggest visual impact with the smallest possible footprint. As he describes the process: “We split open the windows and paint on both the inside surfaces of the glass. Layers and layers, letting them dry, adding more, and so on. And eventually seal them back together. They are almost more like sculptures than paintings, but there’s also that sense of subverting the material so that the window loses all transparency and becomes this other thing to be looked at rather than through.”

This quotation comes from an interview with the writer Irvine Welsh introducing a new book about Kevin’s work which was due to be published last month alongside an exhibition of his work in the gallery. We look forward to sharing both the book and the exhibition later in the year.

There’s a link in Kevin’s use of reclaimed materials to the other series of works for which he is best known, the ‘skips’ that he has been making guerrilla-style on city streets since 2007. The most recent of these ‘Skip 16’ was made in the Bronx in New York the summer before last as part of a solo presentation of his work for Frieze New York. This week, in a parallel universe, we would have been in New York presenting Kevin’s latest glass paintings at this year’s Frieze, but instead they have been viewable on the fair’s online platform, which closes today. To mark that moment our Friday film this week takes us back to the Bronx with Christopher Cook’s remarkable portrait of Kevin at work.