Dimensions: support: 1215 x 912 x 20 mm
Copyright: © Charles Hardaker | CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 DEED, Photo: Tate
Curator: Still Life: Vertical Structures, Three Times Three, painted by Charles Hardaker. It’s… well, it's intriguing, but I feel a sense of melancholy in its muted tones. Almost like a memory box. What strikes you most about it? Editor: That’s a great comparison! I agree. The composition is so formal, almost architectural. I wonder, is it a comment on domesticity, or something more abstract about the human condition? Curator: Perhaps both! Hardaker plays with the familiar. Boxes containing these odd trinkets—egg, bottle, block—like little specimens. Each stack is a life lived, boxed up for display. Does it remind you of anything? Editor: Maybe that impulse we have to collect and categorize things? Curator: Exactly! Like a personal museum, carefully curated. I initially felt the melancholy too, but perhaps there’s something comforting in finding order in chaos. Food for thought! Editor: Yes, seeing it that way makes the stillness feel less sad. Thanks for sharing!
http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/hardaker-still-life-vertical-structures-three-times-three-t00861
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Hardaker studied at Birmingham College of Arts and Crafts, and after completing National Service in 1955 spent three years at the Royal College of Art, London. In 1967 he wrote of this picture: '...it forms part of a series on a theme (or rather multiple themes) which is still developing... Motives for the paintings in general (as much as one dare to define them!) are architectural and philosophical in that the basically cubic container form has been connected with the cube/earth symbol in Plato's Timaeus. But also things as they are is important as any intellectual idea so that the paintings retain strong roots in things seen.' Gallery label, September 2004