Harald Smykla

Harald Smykla studied painting and printmaking at Karlsruhe Academy, Germany before moving to London in 1988. His practice generally merges live art and installation with unorthodox notions of ‘traditional’ media (especially drawing), exploring materiality, time/process, context and interaction. He frequently works in the public realm (street markets, parks, urban and rural spaces, institutions etc), using site -responsive interventions and concepts to engage people of all ages and backgrounds as incidental audiences and active participants in individual and collective art experiences.

Involving low-tech, often ephemeral processes and techniques, narrative invention, play, collective creation, and other methods of communicative exchange, such works generate outcomes from sheer memory to tangible artistic residues, products, documents and pictorial re-interpretations, e.g. through “re-facing” money, chess with produce, collective cardiography, art/emotion research, dental sculpting, drawing on reality with light (‘Reprojection’) and many more.