Harold Ancart: Pools

Harold Ancart: Pools at  David Zwirner gallery presents a series of concrete relief forms derived from the structures of a swimming pool. When Ancart began this body of work he noticed that in New York, people didn’t have swimming pools because of the cost and the lack of space. Ancart created these pools as smaller entities in which there is no particular function which is ironic in the sense that many people who are owners of a pool barely step foot in it. 

Ancart’s three dimensional works are an exploration of color and form, reminiscent of how Josef Albers investigated color relationships using geometric shapes. Albers discovered how the perception of a color can change in relation to the colors surrounding it, and this is evident in Ancart’s sculptural forms. Untitled (2020) depicts a three dimensional rectangle that has a smaller shape embedded within it. There are stairs located on the left side of that shape.The outer surface of the shape is orange while the inner shape is blue, the stairs are a lighter shade of turquoise. Given that orange and blue are complements of one another they create a sense of brightness. In Untitled (2020), the orange color appears to have a higher intensity than the lighter blue color. Also the orange color appears to bleed into the shade of turquoise. In another piece Ancart mixed red and white to create pink. The blue color appears more greyish alongside a pink color that has a light intensity. The color of the staircase which is a light pink, appears to be receding. My perception of these colors is biased because how I perceive color may be different from another individual who is looking at the same piece.