Halsey Hathaway’s ‘Through Kaleidoscope Eyes’ coming to SOCO Gallery in Charlotte

SOCO Gallery presents an exhibition of new works by New York-based artist Halsey Hathaway. This is the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.

The following exhibition details and quotes have been provided by SOCO Gallery:

Entitled “Through Kaleidoscope Eyes,” the exhibition features nine large scale paintings exploring space, light, color and form. Hathaway constructs abstractions through repeated and overlapping forms of interlocking color. The artist’s process builds on additive and retrogressive color structures, an interplay between opaque and stain layers, to create an illusion of new forms and colors.

A kaleidoscope, like light filtering through pieces of colored glass. Hathaway’s color choices are key to his work. They are a nod to mid-century art and design, not unlike Frank Stella hues of the late 60s and 70s. Other artistic influences include medieval religious iconography and American Modernism, with Morris Louis, Sol Lewitt and Hudson River School at the top of the list.

As with all of Hathaway’s work, the viewer is encouraged to visit the paintings multiple times in order to explore how shifts of light influence the soft geometry and color structure. The artist is ever devoted to the subjective viewer through exploring the intersection of the subconscious and perceptual experience.

“The works should be seen over time, allowing them to develop with the subjective viewer’s stream of consciousness, bridging the gap with the changing physical environment, which can also influence one’s perceptions.”

The artist also tackles a new approach, ‘chiasmus’, in a number of the paintings on view in the exhibition. In these works, the color structure is turned inside out, reversing the colors built up of stain into thick opaque paint.

‘Chiasmus’ is a literary device, a means of repeating grammar or concepts in reverse order in the same form. By changing the color and linear structure, this new dialogue asks the viewer to question the structures we accept and the spaces we occupy.

Most of the paintings in the exhibition were created in 2020, a tremendously historic year. Through his paintings, Hathaway generates his own language, his own structure and rules. The final result is pure freedom for the artist — freedom to create a painting unreliant and unencumbered by shifts and flux in the spaces around us.