Henry Ward – Bethany

Henry Ward (b.1971) is an artist, educator, and writer based in London. This monograph documents a major new body of work created during and following a residency at the Josef & Anni Albers Foundation in Bethany, Connecticut, in 2023, and a subsequent residency in the Morvan, Burgundy, in summer 2024.

Ward is interested in line, shape, form, and color relationships. He works primarily as a painter, but also makes drawings and small sculptures. He explores the language of paint by investigating the threshold between abstraction and representation. During the two months he spent at the Albers Foundation, Ward took advantage of the vast studio space and began pinning together cut painted pieces to make assemblages. While there, he produced fifteen paintings on canvas and wood, forty paintings on paper, sixty drawings, twenty ‘cut-outs’ and a full sketchbook. Exclusively working with acrylic paints, he began experimenting, using masking tape and mixing in different mediums so that he could "push the paint around".

The publication includes reproductions of many of the works Ward made during his stay at the Albers Foundation, organized into "Paintings", "Works on Paper", and "Drawings". The final section, "After Bethany", brings together twenty-two acrylic paintings on canvas that the artist created the following year, including during a two-week residency in France.

In his foreword, Fritz Horstman, Education Director of the Albers Foundation, sets the scene in Bethany, detailing the studio buildings and the rural winter landscape, as well as Ward’s "exciting path of exploration and growth" during his time there. While in residence, Ward traveled to nearby New York to meet the artist Amy Sillman in her Brooklyn studio. An edited transcript of their conversation is included here, in which they discuss their individual approaches to painting, writing, and language. In his essay, the curator and writer Jonathan Watkins charts Ward’s thirty-year career as an artist and teacher, drawing out his belief that "art is, by its very nature, educational". In her contribution, Jenni Lomax interviewed Ward in his Woolwich studio about the works he created during both residencies, and the lasting impact they have had on his practice.

Edited by Matt Price and designed by Joe Gilmore, the book is published by Anomie Publishing, London.