Alex Hartley

Working primarily with photography, often incorporating it into sculpture and installation, Hartley's work addresses complicated and sometimes contradictory attitudes toward the built and natural environments. Encounters with buildings are grounded by conventions and expectations, but Hartley shows us new ways of physically experiencing and thinking about our constructed surroundings - through surface and line, scale and materials, locations and contexts. His practice is wide ranging, comprising wall-based sculptural photographic compositions, room-sized architectural installations and, more recently, unique photographic works with sculptural elements inserted as low-relief into the surfaces of large-scale colour prints. Uniting these works is an investigation of modern architecture and the ways in which it is conceived and presented. Often destabilising ideas of 'iconic' architecture, Hartley's practice allows room for multiple perceptions of and uses for architecture.
 
Born in 1963, Alex Hartley lives and works in London and Devon. Graduating from the Royal College of Art in 1990, Hartley has exhibited extensively in both national and international exhibitions at venues including; Leeds Metropolitan Gallery, Leeds (2008) Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh (2007), Natural History Museum (2006), Distrito Cuatro, Madrid (2003), The National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan (2001) and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark (2000). Since 1997 Hartley has been engaged in collaborative site-specific projects with architects including David Adjaye Associates and Alford, Hall, Monaghan and Morris.  In 2012 Hartley will commence his winning proposal for the Artists Taking the Lead 2012 Cultural Olympiad project, which will see him tour the ports and harbours of the South Coast moving one landscape through another.

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