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 and moving image works which oscillate between references to modernist abstraction and the re presentation of imagery derived from pop culture.

His use of abstraction is rooted within discourse which attempts to assert the critical nature of form, particularly within expanded or non medium specific forms of painting; whilst his graphic work reflects more overtly on the importance of popular music in Britain during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s as a means of knowledge exchange, experimentation and opposition. The interconnectedness of these often competing trajectories is best understood in relation the minimal, détourned and sometimes monochromatic record sleeves designed by Jamie Reid and Peter Saville, through which he first encountered visual art. The wider situationist inspired punk and post-punk projects with which Saville and Reid are associated; both amalgams of music, fashion, aesthetics and politics – are key to understanding his own interpretations of art, experimental music and the language of abstraction as compelling and interdependent forms of resistance to the enforced banality of the everyday (Simon Critchley).

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 have come to 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.