Hand-signed by the artist, with title, date, and edition number inscribed in ink on an archival label affixed to the reverse side of the mounted photograph.
The one thing the picture will not give us is the face. Where it should be there are azaleas instead, a pale pink bunch held up like a mask, and the rest is silver hair blown sideways across a wall of near-black clapboard. A woman in a magenta coat stands with her back mostly to us, and whatever she is thinking stays her own. The photograph is built around this absence, and organizes everything else to point at it.
Notice how simply it is arranged. A dark horizontal ground, the long lines of the siding running edge to edge; against it, three clear notes of color: the deep magenta of the coat, the cool gray of the streaming hair, the sugared pink of the flowers. The wind does the composing, dragging the hair into a diagonal that answers the horizontals of the boards. Nothing is fussy. The flowers sit exactly where a portrait would put the eyes, and the swap is the whole idea, delivered without strain.
Harvey, British-born and settled on the coast of Maine, has made a durable body of work from figures who turn away, hide, or bloom into flowers, gathered in books such as Blue Violet and You an Orchestra a Bomb and held in American museums. The archival pigment print is the right vehicle for a picture pitched on so few tones: it holds the dense, even black of the wall without banding, and keeps the faint gradations in silver hair and pink petal that a lesser process would flatten. What it withholds, it makes you want.
The one thing the picture will not give us is the face. Where it should be there are azaleas instead, a pale pink bunch held up like a mask, and the rest is silver hair blown sideways across a wall of near-black clapboard. A woman in a magenta coat stands with her back mostly to us, and whatever she is thinking stays her own. The photograph is built around this absence, and organizes everything else to point at it.
Notice how simply it is arranged. A dark horizontal ground, the long lines of the siding running edge to edge; against it, three clear notes of color: the deep magenta of the coat, the cool gray of the streaming hair, the sugared pink of the flowers. The wind does the composing, dragging the hair into a diagonal that answers the horizontals of the boards. Nothing is fussy. The flowers sit exactly where a portrait would put the eyes, and the swap is the whole idea, delivered without strain.
Harvey, British-born and settled on the coast of Maine, has made a durable body of work from figures who turn away, hide, or bloom into flowers, gathered in books such as Blue Violet and You an Orchestra a Bomb and held in American museums. The archival pigment print is the right vehicle for a picture pitched on so few tones: it holds the dense, even black of the wall without banding, and keeps the faint gradations in silver hair and pink petal that a lesser process would flatten. What it withholds, it makes you want.