David Harrison

Born in 1954, David Harrison lives and works in London.

David Harrison’s paintings, drawings and sculptures present a world in which the natural and the supernatural coexist. His work broadens the languages of contemporary painting and sculpture, drawing into play aspects of culture that are often forgotten, buried, discarded or overlooked. Harrison employs everything that has historically lain outside the mainstream of modern art — age-old symbols and fanciful myths, irrational beliefs, traditional genres such as landscape, exuberant sexuality, barbed wit and a sense of wonder at the natural world — in order to speak vividly about our own time and to reinvigorate the disciplines of painting and sculpture.

Harrison’s paintings give form to a fully realised imaginative universe reminiscent of earlier Romantic visionaries, alive with references to the natural world and populated by animals and figures drawn from myths, legends, contemporary politics and his own biography. While human presence is often shown as ignorant, frivolous or destructive, animal and plant life embody wisdom, balance and enduring knowledge.