Alan Hathaway creates highly sophisticated installations, prints, publications and experimental films which oscillate between references to abstract painting, radical architecture and popular music. Within this highly personal triangulation he makes works – often in response to specific spatial contexts – which juxtapose a language of abstract signs with appropriated archival imagery. In doing so he repositions and recontextualizes the ‘utopian’ forms or singularity of modernism, within more complex understandings of visual language, social culture and abstraction itself.
By combining archival material drawn from both analogue and digital sources – and subjecting his own work to ongoing processes of revision and recycling; he asks how the historic value, cycles of use and modes of reproduction of the images and artefacts which have shaped our cultural histories can be understood as having agency within the present.
Born in London, he has exhibited widely nationally and internationally: Berlin, Copenhagen, Sydney, Melbourne, London, Ukraine, Glasgow and Edinburgh. His work is held in the British Museum’s drawing and print archive as well as numerous private collections internationally. He was shortlisted for the Jerwood Drawing Prize and been artist in residence at Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (mima). He has recently received awards from The National Lottery Heritage Fund, DCMS, Arts Council England, Creative UK, CVAN and The North East Artist’s Fund in partnership with BALTIC Gateshead.