Harold Ancart (b. 1980) is a Belgian-born, New York-based artist who works in various media including painting, drawing, prints, photography and sculpture. In his art, Ancart depicts subjects that naturally invite contemplation such as the horizon, clouds, trees, flowers, flames, and architectural forms.

Untitled depicts a solitary tree rising against a brilliant, amorphous sky. Ancart has often featured trees and other flora in his art, exploring their organic structures as evocative surfaces for painterly exploration. Trees in particular have served as a central form in the artist's work, including a series of expansive paintings that he debuted at his 2020 exhibition Traveling Light, at David Zwirner, New York. Here, Ancart creates a vertical composition with the tree isolated against the sky, evoking the formality and solemnity of traditional portraiture. The tree is highlighted against the contrasting blues and reds of the background, which is devoid of a discernible horizon line. Though the tree is the focal point, the sky constitutes a rich visual world unto itself. As Ancart notes, "There are a million ways of painting the sky....The sky is always different…. This allows the paint to take its own direction…. to wander."¹ 

As with the artist's other subjects, Untitled points to a number of free associative references, and to Ancart’s non-hierarchical, democratic eye, from architecture and art history, to everyday visual influences. They speak to the history of this subject matter in twentieth-century painting, in which trees have been approached in distinct ways, ranging from the surrealist, spectral trees of Rene Magritte; to Egon Schiele's expressionistic Four Trees, in which landscape serves as a foil to the violently abstract crepuscular sky that dominates the composition; Gustav Klimt's immersive, lush plays on vision and the effects of light; Piet Mondrian’s pivotal early works, in which trees and landscape begin to dissolve into the abstract grids he would become best known for; and Joan Mitchell’s and Cy Twombly's sensate depictions of nature and place through a wholly abstract handling of paint.

¹Harold Ancart, in conversation with the gallery, September 2020.

Galleria del Milione, Milan
Carlos Raul Villaneuva Collection, Caracas
J.L e B. Plaza, Caracas
Private Collection
Galleria Tega, Milan
Private Collection

Caracas, Fundación Eugenio Mendoza, Preferencias de los Coleccionistas, May 17-31, 1964; exhibition catalogue, no. 49, illustrated.

Caracas, Museo de Bellas Artes, Les Colecciones Privadas en Venezuela: 57 Obras de la Colección Carlos Raúl Villanueva, 1972; exhibition catalogue, no. 37, illustrated.

Lamberto Vitali, Morandi: Dipinti. Catalogo generale. Volume secondo, 1948-1964 (Milan: Electa Editrice, 1994), cat. no. 771, n.p., illustrated.