Terry Haggerty
Londen (United Kingdom), 1970
The work of Terry Haggerty (1970) is two-dimensional, but has a strong spatial effect. With his characteristic visual language of bent lines in monochromous colour combinations, he know how to evoke the illusion of space; the lines vary in thickness and accentuate volume and depth.
Haggerty is interested in the intersection of flatness and dimensional forms, where lines come together shaped by underlying structures that are on the surface, at once, and shift to a hard bend that takes the flatness of a wall and curves it out of sight. By this way of dealing with perspective, the painting depiction seems to come undone from the white background and causes movement, as it were. Haggerty connects this game of illusion versus reality to a technically perfectionist performance, in which the hand of the artist is nowhere to be seen on the surface of the abstractly painted image.
For De Lakenhal Open Air Museum, Haggerty is creating a mural drawing ‘that will hopefully appear to bend and buckle into a dimensional form that pushes out from the wall, creating empty pockets of space using lineair structures that step up and down across the surface, activating all aspects of the support.’
For Haggerty, De Stijl is ‘a big house, with many rooms and many doors that open up into an asymmetrical world, where the geometry of the straight line, the square and the rectangle live. Most of the rooms are fitted with positive and negative elements that are arranged with non-objective forms and lines. I like to visit from time to time. I have a lot of good memories there. It’s where my family lives. You see yourself in them, but want to do things differently.’
Terry Haggerty was born in London, England, and studied at Cheltenham School of Art, Gloucestershire (UK). His work has been exhibited widely in galleries and museum around the world, including solo presentations at the Norton Museum of Art (West Palm Beach, Florida, USA), the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and Hammer Museum (Los Angeles, USA). He is the recipient of several awards, including the FOR-SITE Foundation Award (2009), the John Anson Kittredge Award (2003) and the NatWest Art Prize (1999). Commissions include mural drawings for the AT&T Stadium in Dallas, Munich Re in London, Roche Diagnostics in Indianapolis and private collections around the world. Terry Haggerty lives and works in New York and Berlin. In the Netherlands his work was seen in Rotterdam and Amsterdam, where he created a large mural in 2007 in W139. In 2009 he created a site-specific mural for the CCNOA (Center for Contemporary Non-Objective Art) in Brussels.
