Alan Hathaway is an artist born in London and currently based in The North East of England. He make installations, prints and drawings which reference and connect the recent histories of popular music culture and abstract art.
As a teenager growing up in Britain during the 1980s, pop music offered a compelling alternative to what he describes as his ‘otherwise limited, claustrophobic, suburban, working class environment‘ – and it was through pop’s visuals that he first encountered art. Jamie Reid’s incendiary work for the Sex Pistols, and Peter Saville’s austere designs for Factory Records, delineated a new conceptually driven visual landscape encompassing détourned found imagery and the reductive anti-marketing abstraction of the blank record sleeve – or monochrome. This new terrain stood in stark contrast to his immediate surroundings and was instrumental in shaping his later alignment with radical formal approaches to abstraction – most notably the early ‘situationist, site-specific interventions of Daniel Buren’ (Hal Foster, 1986) and the deconstruction of form within the Support Surfaces movement.
‘The act therefore of becoming a fan was for Hathaway analogous to that of becoming an artist – making the most of fragments of experience and then representing them through material means’ (Andrew Mummery, 2022).
Through a forensic approach to archival material – coupled with improvised processes combining industrial materials, analogue and digital video, screen-printing, chance and play – he examines the way in which our cultural memories are forged by particular kinds of film stock, printing technologies, surfaces, recording techniques and spatial encounters. His work can be seen as an attempt to consciously assert cultural production as a means of resistance to the ‘banal fact of being in the world’ (Simon Critchley, 2016) – a terrain which he explores equally through found imagery and modes of abstract representation.