APRIL 17, 2020

Photograph: David Zwirner website

“I started working on the ‘pools’ during the summer of 2017. I had just moved to my new studio, which was bigger than the former one. Bigger meant that I could do more things, such as casting concrete forms, which I had done in the past. I knew I wanted to do something new but had no idea what that would be. As summer was making itself comfortable over the city, it got warmer and warmer in my studio.  

My assistant and I were sweating a lot, complaining about the fact that almost nobody has a swimming pool in New York City. It is because of the real estate—the price per square foot, and the density of the population—that no one has one. But what if they were smaller? Anyone could afford the space for one, and even if one could not bathe in it, one could still invite their friends to have a drink or a cigarette around the pool. Who cares that you can’t swim in it; everyone knows that once you own a pool you never go in....We cast the first one on the same day.’’ 

—Harold Ancart

Photograph: David Zwirner website

“I like to think that I can live and develop my work in the same way....By keeping my eyes and my mind open, by accepting the inevitability of my work...and in such a way that one never, ever wonders what to do.” 

Deliberately ambiguous, the pools present numerous dualities: positive and negative space, form and surface, abstraction and figuration, and, ultimately, sculpture and painting.

Photograph: David Zwirner website

“You can’t sit on the image of a chair, even though the image of the chair carries all the elements that could make you think that you could sit on it. You can’t throw yourself out of a painted window. This ambiguity has fascinated the viewer since the beginning of painting.”

Photograph: David Zwirner website

Among the works’ painterly free associations are Josef Albers, whose Homage to the Square and Variant/Adobe works similarly engage tonal and visual effects within a restricted format, playing with surface and the perception of dimensionality; Jo Baer’s minimalist paintings, with their emphasis on the edges of the canvas; David Hockney’s pool paintings; and abstract compositions by Richard Diebenkorn and Peter Halley.

Photograph: David Zwirner website

“[There are] two very simple concerns, both of which are ever-present in my work, but also in the lives of people in general, I think. The first issue relates to traveling and dreaming, the second is bound up with immobility and repetition. Everybody dreams. Everybody is here, but would like to be somewhere further afield. Everybody projects his or herself into the future: it might be near or far, but it’s a better future, where everything will be fine...”

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