In Touch With Tomorrow - Sarah Hardacre

"This collection of works by Sarah Hardacre can be characterised by a surfeit of internal contradictions. Some are explicit and exhibit a knowing irony on the part of the original editors of the magazines from where Sarah selects both her female subjects and works’ titles. Some are more hidden and demand a close reading of the contrasts drawn out by Sarah in her own editorial processes. Humourous, yet melancholic - optimistic, yet depressingly familiar - powerful, simultaneously weakened – are but a few of the apposite opposites that might be ascribed to these images.

By placing these contemporaneous subjects together in such deceptively simple compositions Sarah Hardacre enables a political view, enshrined in the personal and private. The contrasts and contradictions can be as challenging as the viewer is willing to entertain and as entertaining as the viewer wants them to be." Richard Brook

Sarah Hardacre, who lives and works in Manchester, is a renowned artist who exhibits internationally, her work is held in major public collections including the British Museum and British Council. Her exhibition ‘Penthouse and Pavement’ (held at The Modernist) presented a series of collages and prints that use architectural photographs from local history archives, alongside clippings from second-hand pin-up magazines. She is interested in the often stark ‘phallic uprising’ of male dominated modernist architecture as counter to the sensuousness of the female body.

Through collage she overlays the two together to critique the biographical fetishism of modernist architecture, and the often-dehumanising nature of the architecture that surrounds her in the post-industrial landscape of Greater Manchester.

Collage/Artworks by Sarah Hardacre / Introduction by Richard Brook