Precious Grotesqueries: The Jewels of William Harper

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Les Enluminures is honored to host a solo exhibition of William Harper's artworks – "precious grotesqueries" he calls them. Practicing since the mid-1960s, Wiliam Harper (b. 1944) has an extensive œuvre that defies simple definition. His objects combine the precious with the utilitarian, the natural with the industrial world, the medieval era with modern times. They display a deep personal immersion in art history, yet they are by no means dryly academic or remotely historicizing. They are vivid fantasies, adventures into hidden realms, autobiographical reveries, homages to artistic heroes. Like the grotesques in the margins of medieval manuscripts they are often strange and mysterious, yet comic and pleasing