About

Bio:

—Robert Hardgrave has inhabited the city of Seattle, WA for the past 15 years. He adores coffee, delicious breakfasts, and listening to metal. He spends his days, adorned with headphones, drawing and painting detailed creatures and environments. The Internet is his friend and he enjoys going to the mailbox to retrieve his mail.

Press Release from “Xenoglossy” 2007:

Manifested in richly hued layers and expressive line, the creatures and mercurial forms that inhabit Robert Hardgrave’s visions of reincarnation come to life in this emotional new series of paintings. Comprised of acrylics on canvas, panel and paper, “Xenoglossy” documents a deeply personal period in the artist’s life—soon after receiving a kidney transplant in 2003, Hardgrave learned that his new kidney had developed lymphoma that necessitated an arduous six-month course of chemotherapy. The remission of the cancer subsequently ushered in a new duality in Hardgrave’s life: relative good health and a reinvigorated approach to his work. Channeling themes of life, death, and the gray spaces between, Hardgrave’s organic, multi-layered paintings appear as though they’ve been summoned from an alternate mystical dimension. And while that notion may seem whimsical, the paintings in “Xenoglossy” are proof that Hardgrave’s transformative personal turmoil has awakened a profoundly new creative reservoir.

In addition to being technically engaging, each work suggests a unique cellular memory or blueprint of life—Hardgrave’s distinctly life-like forms are at once benevolent and tranquil, ominous and strangely menacing. “In this particular body of work I am attempting to relate my idea of the many possibilities of reincarnation,” Hardgrave says. “Not necessarily in the sense that when one dies they become a wombat or a newt, but that life can continue in the memories of the living.” In the painting “Kiss of Death,” this idea is visually expressed as being “a death for a life” the artist says. The pink and red forms depicted quietly communicate with one another, gracefully undulating, inviting the viewer to witness their coalescence. “Octave,” another painting on paper, is a more densely populated piece, capturing the convergence of eight separate creatures, each trying to see life in a different light. “All of my work is created via stream-of-consciousness,” Hardgrave says, “I just let the work evolve and figure out what it means during the process or sometimes afterward.” This feverish, unbridled approach to painting allows Hardgrave to capture his thoughts in their raw, unedited form—details that translate with great immediacy in his work.

Written by: Matthew Newton


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“As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.”

-Carl Gustav Jung


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