Marcus Harvey makes highly worked figurative paintings. He became well known after his infamous painting Myra was first exhibited at the Royal Academy in London in September 1997 as part of the exhibition Sensation. It resulted in unprecedented national and international media attention as it was based on the portrait of the child-murderer Myra Hindley, an image that has been repeatedly reproduced by the press since her conviction. The monumental monochrome painting was entirely composed from a child’s handprints and as the artist has said, “The whole point of the painting is the photograph. That photograph. The iconic power that has come to it as a result of years of obsessive media reproduction.”
Harvey was one of a group of artists who graduated from Goldsmith’s College, London, in the late 1980s. For his first solo show in London, held at White Cube in 1994, Harvey exhibited paintings also based on photographs. These Readers Wives paintings took their subjects from pornographic sources, their imagery defined by a black line juxtaposed against an intensely painterly ground that in passages becomes suggestively physical in its impasto.
Since 2000, Harvey has created a series of door panel paintings, which depict domestic vignettes in a photorealist manner through the distortion of a patterned glass set within a single or double door frame. In After Hopper, the viewer is offered a peeping-tom perspective of a man reading in bed and a woman dressing, a typical dark motel scene as painted by Edward Hopper in the 1930s. Another door panel suspiciously depicts a self-portrait of the artist with a meat-cleaver in his hand and covered in blood, as if caught in the act of an unimaginable atrocity.
Marcus Harvey was born in Leeds in 1963 and lives and works in London. He has participated in several important group exhibitions such as ‘Some Went Mad, Some Ran Away’, Serpentine Gallery, London (1994), ‘Sensation’, Royal Academy, London (1997) and 'In the darkest hour there may be light: Works from Damien Hirst’s murderme collection', Serpentine Gallery, London.
Harvey’s solo exhibitions include White Cube, London (2009, 1994), Galleria Marabini, Bologna (2009, 2007, 2005) and Mimmo Scognamiglio, Naples (2005), Mary Boone, Gallery, New York (2002) and Tanya Bonakdar, New York (1995). He has exhibited extensively internationally in group shows such as ‘You Dig The Tunnel, I’ll Hide The Soil’, White Cube, Hoxton Square and Shoreditch Town Hall, London (2008), Summer Exhibition 2007 and 2006, Royal Academy, London, ‘In the darkest hour there may be light: Works from Damien Hirst’s murderme collection’, Serpentine Gallery, London and ‘Sensation’, Royal Academy of Arts, London (1997); Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (1998-99); Brooklyn Museum, New York (1999-2000) and ‘Some Went Mad, Some Ran Away’, Serpentine Gallery, London (1994). Harvey is the co-founder of the 'Turps Banana', a magazine devoted to painting and written by painters (www.turpsbanana.com).
