ARDEN + WHITE is pleased to announce a solo exhibition with roster artist Gwen Hardie. Hardie is known for her ability to capture the subtle shifts and nuances of color under varying light conditions. Her meticulous technique involves layering and blending colors to create soft transitions and luminous surfaces, making each piece a study of the ethereal qualities of light.
Under a Deep Orange Sun and a Pale Blue Moon, indirectly explores the full chromatic range of light. Through color and tone, Hardie captures the fleeting radiance and warmth of the sun, the coolness and soft diffusion of moonlight, and the play of shadows—inviting viewers to experience the ephemeral beauty of these moments rather than seeing them represented literally. This atmospheric use of color evokes a sense of time and place that is universally familiar yet open to individual interpretation.
The exhibit presents vertical and horizontal sequences of individual paintings, each exploring gradient transitions within a color field. These sequences do not follow an expected order; instead, they emphasize the nuanced relationships among hues and highlight the dynamic movement in their subtle differences. As visitors enter, they encounter cool, moonlike tones—a new addition to Hardie’s investigation of color in this series—that gradually transition into warm hues deeper within the gallery, creating an immersive journey through color and light.
Through color, Hardie explores the dimensions, demonstrating how light can transform and animate the visual field. Her paintings often hover between abstraction and representation, drawing viewers into a contemplative space where the boundaries of color and form are fluid and ever-changing.
Through her art, Hardie continues to push the boundaries of perception, creating paintings that are as much about seeing as they are about being seen—a quiet mastery that invites us to look, reflect, and find beauty in the subtle energy of life, light, and color.
A reception with the artist will be held on November 15th from 5:30 - 7:30 PM in the gallery.
ARTIST STATEMENT
"Under a deep orange sun and a pale blue moon refers to the two natural ways that we can perceive color - by sunlight and moonlight. Though I don’t literally illustrate this, I am exploring color and tone in a distilled language that encompasses the range of light conditions known to us.
When painting, I feel as if I am in a magnified world of perceptual sensation. Small differences of radiance and tonal gradients expand beyond any limit. I think about how light and shadow move across and through surfaces, evoking varying densities and depths of field.
Colors have their own peculiar interactions with each other and I discover their possibilities while making the painting, continually adjusting the temperature and tonality of both grounds until the foreground reverberates in the way I am searching for.
I like the taut canvas, the folded corners, and the flat shape. When you look from the side, you see a trace of the stain of the background color but the oil film stops at the front edge, revealing exactly what it is in physical form.
The magic occurs for me when the colors start to reverberate and somehow come to life within this medium of oil paint. Each painting presents a floating foreground color over a background color – but rather than just floating – the foreground color seems also embedded into the background color and by extension the actual canvas.
The transitional ‘walls,’ as I think of them, play such an active role in achieving this illusion. They are the key to everything, and yet they engage almost on a subliminal level – it’s here in the interstices between grounds that the transformation between dimensions can be realized." - GWEN HARDIE
