About Gregor

 

phone: 07803 906 129

email: mail@gregorharvie.com

 

Click here to listen to Nicky Barranger interview Gregor about GENE MEME

 

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Gregor’s wide-ranging artistic practice includes painting and the creation of artistic installations which enable the viewer to engage intuitively with complex subjects. He is Managing Director of G&A Harvie Ltd, a creative consultancy that uses contemporary art and outreach programmes to help people engage with the major social themes of our time. He is also a member of the Sylark artist collective that runs two galleries on the Southbank in London. Gregor works both on solo shows and in collaboration with the writer Alex Harvie.

Gregor’s paintings challenge the boundaries between art and philosophy, between abstract expression and controlled thought. His practice is rigorous and demanding, exploring different techniques as he develops his thinking. This engagement with the subject gives his paintings a thoughtful, deeply contemplative quality.

His Gene Meme paintings are visceral and corporeal. The technique adopted mirrors the subject; an under-painting of skeletal webs and cellular structures overlaid with translucent membranes. Gregor goes out of his way to disrupt any emerging compositional structure, maintaining a sense of life by opting for gestural blots and splashes, and loose washes of contrasting colours, rather than allowing order to appear. He uses pure, optically luxuriant colours; deep blood reds, cold pale blues, organic, luminous yellows and vivid oranges, applied in such dense combinations that the paintings seem at the same time to contain every colour and yet to be almost monochromatic.

In contrast, his Free Will paintings are emotionally-charged depictions of transient moments, abstract figures engrossed in their own inner worlds.  They speak of a fragile existence. They are sensuous, vivid and optimistic paintings. Fluid-flowing lines and free-floating forms are created by spontaneous bouts of drawing overlaid with freely applied washes of paint. The continued over-layering of these techniques gives these paintings a sense of depth and intense variation that makes the figures appear to float in three-dimensional space, disconnected from the real world, seeming almost to have materialised on the paper.

Gregor was born in 1969 to a Scottish family and was brought up in Devon where he trained with Dudley Weatherley, a local professional artist, from a young age. Gregor has a PhD in environmental design and is a qualified architect. He won the de Laszlo Foundation Prize for Portraiture in 2001. Gregor writes and gives talks on art and environmental design, he has tutored architectural students on environmental design and has been an external examiner for BSc students at the Welsh School of Architecture. 

Gregor currently lives in London where he is working on Gene Meme, a collaborative art installation about world population that will open in the Crypt Gallery in London on 9 June 2010.

A selection of Gregor's small works and sketches are on permanent display at the Oxo Tower's Skylark Gallery in London. Larger works can be viewed by appointment with Gregor or through Lena Boyle Fine Art.

A catalogue of Gregor's work from 2008 is available online at blurb.