Fine Art Research Unit (FARU): Talk with Henry Ward (Visiting Artist and Director of the Freelands Foundation)

We are delighted to welcome visiting artist and director of Freelands Foundation, Henry Ward. 

Henry Ward’s paintings operate on the threshold of abstraction and representation. Made instinctively they tackle the formal qualities of paint; thick and thin, opaque and translucent, gestural and graphic. Often inspired by objects, Ward’s paintings create suggestions of spaces, populated by forms that feel recognisable but are unnameable. Alongside the studio paintings, Ward has been making a series of works on paper in his garden shed for the past 5 years. This series, “Shed Paintings”, informs the more realised pieces in the studio, creating an ongoing dialogue between the different sites of practice.

Ward studied a BA Fine Art Painting at Winchester School of Art, graduating in 1993, and went on to further study at Goldsmiths College and Middlesex University, where he completed a PhD in 2013. He has worked as an educator in different contexts for the past 25 years, currently teaching on the TURPs programmes as well as being a visiting lecturer at art schools across the United Kingdom. Alongside this he is the Director of Freelands Foundation, a charity supporting art education projects.

Recent exhibitions include: Look Both Ways with Kittoe Contemporary (2023), Shapeshifters at Irving Contemporary, Oxford (2023), A Little Closer, Aleph Contemporary (2023), Small is Beautiful XL, Flowers Gallery. (2022) and on Surface – Perspectives in Painting, Messums London (2022). His most recent solo exhibition was From Woolwich at Oasis, Frinton-on Sea (2023). Ward was shortlisted for the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize in 2018, 2019 and 2022 and was included in The Football Art Prize in 2022. In early 2023 he was artist in residence at The Albers Foundation, Connecticut, USA.