Submit a bio  

Artist Biography & Facts
Hilary Harkness

Hilary Harkness (Born 1971) is active/lives in New York, Connecticut.  Hilary Harkness is known for Contemporary realism-narrative female issues.

A painter focused on women's issues conveyed by highly developed technical painting skills, Hilary Harkness has done a series about women living and working together on battleships and submarines---traditionally a male-dominated environment.  Her method is to group many scenes together in a manner both delineated and relational that allows the viewer to see directly into each interior while getting an overall impression of her themes, which include sex and power and tensions resulting from confined living.  Each section is highly detailed and realistic, and reflect the artists great interested in painting technique as well the complex world depicted in her subject matter.

Her work is provocative and controversial, and has been described as 'kinky', 'obsessive', 'perverse', and 'anti-female'.  Some persons accuse Harkness of being anti-feminist, but few have accused her of lacking originality.  Critic Jerry Saltz describes her style as "a ho   ...  [Displaying 1000 of 2780 characters.]  Artist bio

Artist auction records

.  askART's database currently holds 22 auction lots for Hilary Harkness (of which 18 auction records sold and 0 are upcoming at auction.)

Artist artworks for sale and wanted

.  There are 0 artworks for sale on our website by galleries and art dealers . There are 0 galleries and art dealers listing works of art by Hilary Harkness as either "Wanted" or "For Sale" .

Research resources

.  askART lists Hilary Harkness in 0 of its research Essays. Hilary Harkness has 0 artist signature examples available in our database.

Similar artists

.  There are 24 similar (related) artists for Hilary Harkness available:    Barnaby Furnas,  John Wesley,  Richard Prince,  Christopher Wool,  Malcolm Morley,  Tom Sachs,  Elizabeth Peyton,  Donald Baechler,  Gary Hume,  Allan McCollum,  Glenn Ligon,  James Brooks,  Philip Taaffe,  James Rosenquist,  Francis Alys,  Larry Rivers,  Takashi Murakami,  Rudolf Stingel,  Richard Pettibone,  Joel Elias Shapiro,  Robert Peter Mangold,  Adolph Gottlieb,  Yoshitomo Nara,  Kenny Scharf



Copyright © 1999-2024 askART.com and underlying auction houses. All Rights Reserved. Digital copying of these images and content strictly prohibited; violators will be subject to the law including the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Facts about Hilary Harkness

Biography from the Archives of askART

A painter focused on women's issues conveyed by highly developed technical painting skills, Hilary Harkness has done a series about women living and working together on battleships and submarines---traditionally a male-dominated environment.  Her method is to group many scenes together in a manner both delineated and relational that allows the viewer to see directly into each interior while getting an overall impression of her themes, which include sex and power and tensions resulting from confined living.  Each section is highly detailed and realistic, and reflect the artists great interested in painting technique as well the complex world depicted in her subject matter.

Her work is provocative and controversial, and has been described as 'kinky', 'obsessive', 'perverse', and 'anti-female'.  Some persons accuse Harkness of being anti-feminist, but few have accused her of lacking originality.  Critic Jerry Saltz describes her style as "a hodgepodge that includes the wild proliferation of Hieronymus Bosch, the verisimilitude of Cranach, the hollow women of Paul Delvaus, the trashiness of Tom of Finalnd, and the wonderful reactionary retro-realism of Paul Cadmus and George Tooker.  Add to this a whiff of Thomas Hart Benton, superhero comics, Popular Science magazine, women's prison films, World War II illustration, lesser-known surrealists like Leonora Carrington and Leonor Fini, and affinities with contemporaries like Tim Gardner and Jim Shaw, and you've got a genuinely oddball mix."

One of her paintings, Neutral Vessel, "features more than 200 teeny females---many of them mysteriously pregnant" and "involved in an intense interplay for control, power, and sexual dominance", oozing "a bitchy, demonic kinkiness, which makes looking at these paintings slippery fun." Some of her figures seem "gut-shot full of phalluses." (Saltz) And most of her women are scantily clad, dressed only in bras and panties or short shorts, and are in various locations such as bathrooms, gynocology exam rooms, or detention centers.

Hilary Harkness earned a B.A. degree with honors at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1993; and an M.F.A. degree from Yale University in 1996.  She has been a visiting artist at the Yale School of Art (2002) and Brandeis University (2001).  From 1996 to 1997, she was an Adjunct Professor at the University of New Haven.


Sources include:
Jerry Saltz, "Woman Overboard", The Village Voice, April 27, 2001
Laura Smith, "Interview With New York Painter Hillary Harkness", November, 2004, www.fnewsmagazine.com/2004-nov/ current/2004-nov/pages/15.shtml
Feigen Gallery, New York


** If you discover credit omissions or have additional information to add, please let us know at [email protected].

Share an image of the Artist: [email protected].
Top