JANUARY 20 – MARCH 5, 2021

SOCO Gallery is delighted to present an exhibition of new works by New York-based artist Halsey Hathaway. This is the artist’s second solo  exhibition with the gallery. 

Entitled Through Kaleidoscope Eyes,  the exhibition features nine large scale paintings exploring space, light, color and form.  Hathaway constructs abstractions through repeated and overlapping forms of interlocking color. The artist’s process builds on additive and retrogressive color structures, an interplay between opaque and stain layers, to create an illusion of new forms and colors. A kaleidoscope, like light filtering through pieces of colored glass. 

Hathaway’s color choices are key to his work. They are a nod to mid-century art and design, not unlike Frank Stella hues of the late 60s and 70s.  Other artistic influences include medieval religious iconography and American Modernism, with Morris Louis, Sol Lewitt and Hudson River School at the top of the list. 

As with all of Hathaway’s work, the viewer is encouraged to visit the paintings multiple times in order to explore how shifts of light influence the soft geometry and color structure. The artist is ever devoted to the subjective viewer through exploring the intersection of the subconscious and perceptual experience. “The works should be seen over time, allowing them to develop with the subjective viewer's stream of consciousness, bridging the gap with the changing physical environment, which can also influence one's perceptions.” 

The artist also tackles a new approach, ‘chiasmus’, in a number of the paintings on view in the exhibition. In these works, the color structure is turned inside out, reversing the colours built up of stain into thick opaque paint.  ‘Chiasmus’ is a literary device, a means of repeating grammar or concepts in reverse order in the same form. By changing the color and linear structure, this new dialogue asks the viewer to question the structures we accept and the spaces we occupy. 

Most of the paintings in the exhibition were created in 2020, a tremendously historic year. Through his paintings, Hathaway generates his own language, his own structure and rules. The final result is pure freedom for the artist — freedom to create a painting unreliant and unencumbered by shifts and flux in the spaces around us. 

HALSEY HATHAWAY (American, B. 1980)

Halsey Hathaway (American, b. 1980) has been making this body of work for over a decade, and has exhibited throughout North and Central America. He received his BFA from the Pratt Institute of Art & Design (2002) and his MFA from Hunter College (2006). Hathaway’s most recent exhibitions were at Kristen Lorello, New York, NY and SOCO Gallery, Charlotte, NC.  He was included in the exhibition PaintersNYC at Paramo Galleria, Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico (2016) which then travelled to Museo de los Pintores Oaxaquenos, Oaxaca, Mexico as well as Site/Displace at Kristen Lorello, New York, NY (2014); Drawings, Denny Gallery, New York, NY (2013); New Paintings, Storefront Bushwick, Brooklyn, NY (2012) and Line and Plane,  McKenzie Fine Art, New York, NY (2012) as well as three solo exhibitions at Rawson Projects, New York, NY. Hathaway has been awarded the Tony Smith Award from Hunter College and was a fellow in painting from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Upcoming solo exhibitions in 2021 include Kristen Lorello, New York, NY and Xxijra Hii, London, UK.  Hathaway lives and works in New York City.