FEBRUARY 26 - MARCH 21, 2026
Acts of Incline
Marion Harper presents her debut solo exhibition at Gallerysmith.
Acts of Incline is a series of paintings by Marion Harper using a restrained palette, arranged into pairs. The paintings are part of an ongoing interrogation into the way bodies are held in space. Whether sentient or inanimate, these bodies, these objects, are conceived as morphic forms prone to the will of gravitational forces. A play of wills between objects and space reveals the vital relation between ground and gravity. However, as Marion notes, the intention was to do more than depict figures in space. It was to “test thresholds, shift perspectives”, and produce surfaces that resonate (vibrate) with sensational affect. “Bodies lean, angle, and reorient; they negotiate gravity, architecture and furniture to locate new positions from which to sense and think.”[1]
In preparation, active figures were photographed by Marion, rendered then in pencil and pen, before finally going through the decisions and methods that belong uniquely to painting.
Right: Marion Harper, Between standing and falling, 2025, oil on oak panel, 72x60cm
Left: Marion Harper, Come out, 2025, oil on oak panel, 72x60cm
In the manner of a single film frame, excised from its larger whole, Marion shows the figures teetering in the midst of movement. We can imagine the next frame. It would be another still image, slightly advanced, but set to disappear into the flow of animation. This image is offered as a way to emphasise the intensified instant caught in the painting. In effect, the next moment of arrested action is unknown, open to multiple possibilities. This unpredictability means that the body, for Marion, is anticipating a reinvigorated and hopeful future.
(Dis)orientating, (re)orientating bodies...
Along the axis between intoxication and sobriety… or in the impact of rapid, vertiginous falls and slow, replenishing recoveries, “disorientation becomes a way to imagine new relations, new spaces, and new ways of feeling embodied”.[2] The hope is to elicit an attack on the nervous system so that sensational affects can release “the unthinkable in thought”.[3]
As Western capitalism spiralled after World War II, and urban spaces and architecture were coopted to its cause (efficient, functional and orientating), a vital act of resistance for the Situationist Internationale was to experience spaces that were “disorientating”. [4] As self-proclaimed New Babylonians,[5] they once asked what it would be like to navigate the streets of Paris using a map of Amsterdam. What they envisaged was the thrill of wandering aimlessly through labyrinthine forms, free from the inculcating ways of modern capitalism.
Perhaps this is a first encounter with Acts of Incline…
Left: Marion Harper, Tipping Point, 2025, oil on oak panel, 120x100cm
Right: Marion Harper, What begins as a fracture becomes passage, 2025, oil on oak panel, 120x100cm
Subjects are discovered in the throes of bodily/nervy movement (somewhere) between steadiness and dizziness, plasticity and tautness, frailty and strength… It becomes a decisive point towards hopeful growth and transformation, or a slide back into old fixed ways.
The diptychs are monochromes. Each pair is bound (subtly) by a colour that fades or pulsates across the surface. Often this occurs at the edges of the objects so that the surrounding spaces appear as fields of dusty, downy tints, allowing the bodies and objects to bounce out of darker or lighter fields.
Marion treats colour “not as an event” (in the way colour subjugates the forms that it touches) but as a way “to register atmospheric or bodily sensations”. She has selected high-chroma pigments (with poetic names):
Cadmium reds and yellows
Prussian blue
Ultramarine blue
Vermilion
Alizarin crimson
Burnt umber
Sap green
Viridian green
Cobalt violet
Marion’s blacker-than-blacks are achieved by mixing three colours — Prussian blue, Alizarin crimson and Burnt umber.[6] I want to finish here by suggesting that such alchemical wizardry permeates all areas of Acts of Incline: in its rendering, colour mixing, and conceptual clarity.
Jan Bryant
Marion Harper, Koan I, II, and III, 2025, oil on oak panel, 56x48cm
[1] Marion Harper, “Exhibition Brief,” December, 2025.
[2] “Exhibition Brief.”
[3] Gilles Deleuze, Cinema II: The Time Image, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989) 168.
[4] Forming in Alba (Italy) in 1957 from various European avant-garde art movements, such as the Lettrists/Internationale, and CoBrA, the Situationist Internationale (SI) were focused on an anti-capitalist agenda. The SI were formerly dissolved in 1972.
[5] Constant Nieuwenhuys (a Dutch member of SI) created evolving models for imaginary, mobile cities called New Babylon, in which the inhabitants, would no longer need to work, using play and technology as catalysts for permanent transformation. Constant worked on the project until his death in 2005.
[6] Studio discussions with the artist.