«To Be Determined is about the unpredictability of the future and the fallible certainty of the past. To Be Determined is about how wrinkled, scratched, and tattered our fragile lives are. To Be Determined is about experiencing life as it happens and staying surprised and curious as it happens. To Be Determined is to be determined in all that you do.»

 

A brave explorer with a sincere look in his eyes. Robert Hardgrave is more than an american artist with a long and interesting career. His art is inseparably bound to his life experience. Both are marked by important chapters with well-defined styles, different from each other but united by a quiet and conscious evolution.

 

Born in Oxnard, California, Robert Hardgrave has made a significant contribution to visual arts in the Pacific Northwest for over a decade. Finalist for the 2014 Cornish College of the Arts Neddy Award in Painting and nominee for the 2014 Portland Art Museum’s Contemporary Northwest Arts Awards, Hardgrave has exhibited in numerous solo and group shows in Seattle, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Denver, Chicago or New York. This is his first solo show outside the United States.

 

Hardgrave’s work walks the path from abstract figuration to figurative abstraction. In this tour he collects influences from the 20th century avant-garde, so cubist, expressionists and dadaists elements can be found in his works. Actually, there is no one single path for Hardgrave, just freedom. Robert works and is carried away by the technique, he express himself in any direction that it takes him. He explores, get lost and find a new path, a new technique, a new expression, but actually, is not new, it was his and was there waiting to be rediscovered.

 

This exhibition shows Hardgrave’s last steps, his latest artistic reincarnation, through small-format drawings and large size collages made by awesome toner transfers on Tyvek, a very resistant type of paper made with high density polyethylene fibers.