Henry Ward
Engine Room
Henry Ward works between three sites: his kitchen table, his shed and his studio. Small objects are made on the kitchen table, utilising materials found whilst walking in the city. The shed is a place for daily practice, where an ongoing series of works on paper are made. These Kitchen Table Sculptures and Shed Paintings inform the work made in the studio. The studio paintings are made over many months, and sometimes years, with different iterations building up over time and creating conversational juxtapositions. Ward is interested in exploring the threshold between representation and abstraction. His works investigate the formal language of materials: thick and thin; gestural and graphic; opaque and translucent; hard and soft.
In Engine Room, Ward presents a range of works including sketchbook pages, drawings, Shed Paintings, Kitchen Table Sculptures and a series of paintings made on the pages of a copy of Alan Bowness’s “Modern Sculpture” (accidently “stolen” from Central School of Art Library when Ward was on Foundation there in 1989). The exhibition seeks to uncover the process involved in making, creating conversations between the different areas of Ward’s practice.
Henry Ward is a painter, living and working in London. He studied a BA Fine Art Painting at Winchester School of Art, graduating in 1993, and went on to further study at Goldsmiths College and Middlesex University, where he completed a PhD in 2013.
Recent solo exhibitions include: Medusa & Other Stories with Kittoe Contemporary at the London Art Fair, 2024 and From Woolwich at Oasis Gallery, Frinton on Sea, 2023. Selected group exhibitions include: Knot – Rachael Causer & Henry Ward at Stone Space, London 2024; Look Both Ways with Kittoe Contemporary, 2023; Shapeshifters at Irving Contemporary, Oxford, 2023; A Little Closer, Aleph Contemporary, 2023; Small is Beautiful XL, Flowers Gallery, 2022; and on Surface – Perspectives in Painting, Messums London, 2022. Ward was shortlisted for the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize in 2018, 2019 and 2022 and was included in The Football Art Prize in 2022. The first substantial publication on his work, “Shed Paintings”, was published in 2021. In early 2023 he was artist in residence at The Albers Foundation, Connecticut, USA and in 2024 he will undertake a residency at Stephen Swindell Studios in Dijon, France.
@HenzWard