Maine artist Kate Hargrave's solo exhibition "The Journal" is at Elizabeth Moss Galleries, Portland, ME, from January 10, 2025, through March 8, 2025.
That every one of the nine paintings in “Kate Hargrave: The Journal” at Moss Galleries in Portland (through Mar. 8) sold within 24 hours of the opening is itself astounding. It tells us much about Hargrave’s startling originality, but also about the art scene in Maine. Clearly, we have been hankering for something this fresh and this new, and in Hargrave, it has been justifiably discovered.
Hargrave is not one of Maine’s bold-faced names. A graduate of Rhode Island School of Design, she labored over this suite of paintings in relative isolation, continually and simultaneously, over a period of 10 years, during which she also raised two children. This reveals a process of gradual development and accretion, something we rarely intuit in art nowadays, a lot of which is turned out within shorter cycles of exploration that rarely afforded the luxury of time to gestate and mature amid the vicissitudes of the art market.
The artist cites “Pieter Bruegel, Lucas Cranach, Remedios Varo and the sometimes-anonymous picture book illustrators who bring mystery to children’s literature,” as influences. But, though her works mostly spare the wrathful damnations of another Netherlandish master, Hieronymus Bosch, there is also an unsettlingly Boschian tremulation humming nervously beneath the surface.
Hargrave’s paintings are about innocent wonder and its loss, but also about very grown-up overwhelm. They toe a line between the eroticism of adult sexuality and the sometimes confusingly titillating eroticism between mother and child. The Belfast-based artist Annika Earley introduced me to the term “matrescence,” a neologism gaining traction in psychology that refers to the tsunami of environmental, hormonal and neurobiological changes that accompany the advent of motherhood. It is most appropriate here.
Kate Hargrave, “The Milkmaid,” oil on birch panel. Photo courtesy of the artist
Compositionally, Hargrave’s closest link is Bruegel, who depicted variegated narratives of harvests, folk traditions, dancing, worship, leisure activities and so on in a non-centralized way (Bosch, too, though more disturbingly); the action in those paintings unfolded all over the canvas, confounding one principal focus. But unlike the sweeping Northern Renaissance perspectives of Bruegel, Hargrave compresses all that activity into a room with a hearth, or a tightly cropped vignette such as “The Milkmaid,” where the action takes place largely in the foreground.
Kate Hargrave, “The Fisherman’s Shadow,” oil on birch panel. Photo courtesy of the artist
This intensifies the oddity of what we are looking at. These are not Bruegel’s secular genre scenes of peasants. There’s lustiness and chaos, children scampering everywhere, nude women dominating every scene, though many levitate in a state somewhere between pubescence and fully realized womanhood (Hargrave paints most with smooth, pillowy patches of skin where their sex should be and offers no introitus). These women’s bodies seem to be simultaneously identified with the fairy-tale world of their child hearts, the ripening of teen hormonal impulses, and the carnal pleasure of mature sexuality.
We can also experience them as emotionally snagged in intricate webs of maternal responsibility, longing for a more carefree pre-maternal state, and aware of both the power childbearing gives them and the way society’s expectations of that power can suffocate desire and aspiration. Hargrave’s is a superficially fantastical, yet more subliminally discomfiting, domesticity in which her women are neither ecstatically happy nor dispassionately alienated. More than a few appear to be a little mad, and some have the hollow-eyed, sallow-skinned looks of Varo’s characters.
Kate Hargrave, “The Babysitter,” oil on birch panel. Photo courtesy of the artist
It is unimportant — if not downright impossible — to unravel these multifarious threads and plot lines. In fact, I’d be surprised if Hargrave herself could do so because the imagery and subject matter arrived to her over a long and eventful decade, the narratives becoming convoluted and subsumed in a perpetually redefining present where the details no longer mattered. We spy figures in the paintings that might have played a role at one time but whom Hargrave did not quite paint out, so that they partially emerge from under cobblestones or as shadows against a wall, no more than dim evidence that a year (or three or eight) ago they may have held relevance. Most of Hargrave’s paintings are also steeped in a hazy gloom barely illuminated by candlelight, adding further strangeness and ambiguity.
It will be interesting to see where Hargrave goes from here. Will we need to wait another decade for the next body of work? Can she sustain the densely layered richness of her practice through shorter periods of development? As her children leave the nest, will her preoccupation with characters who are half girl-half woman and half boy-half man switch to scenes that are less darkly, mysteriously enchanted? I, for one, cannot wait to see what’s next.
IF YOU GO
WHAT: “Kate Hargrave: The Journal”
WHERE: Elizabeth Moss Galleries, 100 Fore St., Portland
WHEN: Through Mar. 8
HOURS: Tues.-Sat., 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
ADMISSION: Free
FOR MORE INFO: 804-0459, elizabethmossgalleries.com