Alan Hathaway is an artist born in London and currently based in The North East of England. He creates reductive and highly sophisticated installations, prints, drawings and moving image works which oscillate between references to abstraction and the re presentation of imagery derived from pop culture.
The interconnectedness of these apparently competing trajectories is best understood in relation the reductive, détourned and occasionally monochromatic record sleeves designed by Jamie Reid and Peter Saville, through which Hathaway first encountered visual art. The situationist projects with which Saville and Reid are associated, are also key to understanding his subsequent framing of art, pop and the language of abstraction as aesthetic and conceptually driven forms of resistance; offering fleeting moments of escape from the enforced banality of the everyday (Simon Critchley).
His work therefore reflects more broadly on the importance of popular music in Britain during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s (particularly for working class communities), as a means of knowledge exchange; and frames this cultural sphere as a form of social abstraction – a methodological rewiring of the relationships between music, art, work, leisure, publishing, philosophy, politics, identity and fashion. Through open ended experimentation with industrial materials, home VHS recordings, YouTube videos and archival printed matter, he considers the way in which the historic value of the images and objects which define both art and pop, their modes of reproduction and cycles of use, have shaped our collective cultural unconscious and can be understood as having agency within the present.
He has exhibited widely nationally and internationally: Copenhagen, Sydney, Melbourne, Ukraine, Glasgow, London. 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 and been artist in residence at MIMA. He has recently received awards from DCMS Cultural Recovery Fund, Arts Council England, Creative UK, CVAN and The North East Artist’s Fund in partnership with BALTIC Gateshead.