Savannah Marie Harris’s Bold Abstract Canvases Are Rife with Tension and Beauty

Savannah Marie Harris gives her abstract canvases time to breathe, rest, grow, and decay. “I have a moment with each and then forget about them; hiding them in a corner in my studio,” she explained in a recent interview with Artsy. Her dazzling, layered abstractions emerge through a process she likens to geological expressions of the Earth, like rock formation and erosion.

The rising artist herself is undergoing tectonic shifts in her career. Having seen success before even graduating from London’s esteemed Royal College of Arts (RCA) in 2023, she has made an impact at shows across tastemaking galleries in the city over the last year. Now, with several of her paintings featured in Artsy’s online fair Foundations, Harris has been awarded the inaugural Artsy Foundations Prize, in recognition of her fresh, original work. As the winner, her work will be featured on a billboard in New York’s Times Square from February 12th–25th, expanding her reach across the Atlantic.

“I see the surfaces of my paintings as being the ‘inner core’ quite literally and conceptually,” she explained, “and the making process goes through this motion of layering, a sort of avalanche of swirls and drips altering in form.” She’ll build up the canvases with eight to ten layers of paint, often including sand mixed in, then when it starts to feel like too much, she starts to break them down through scraping and scratching with a palette knife or a sponge. “I like when they can get quite dense and thick in texture like building this crust, but I scrape back when I reach this tipping point of annihilation.”

There’s tension, destruction, and chaos embedded in the works, Harris explained. Her approach is intuitive and spontaneous; often paintings move through her studio from a corner, to the wall, to the floor or vice versa, undergoing an act of “weathering.” A prime recent example is Shards of Grass (2023), a small canvas that she began last April made up of writhing gestures and swathes of color—from chartreuse and olive greens and deep, velvety purples, hints of pink, rusty reds, and streaks of white—all vibrating with texture.

“It evolved naturally, picking and choosing what I want to be revealed and what to disguise,” Harris reflected. “I move between working with a light touch to applying thickly, really aggressively. It’s all about this ongoing tension suspended over time. Initially the colors I choose are quite bright, but over time they become muted with the debris of paint building onto the surface.” Eventually, intuitively, she stops, “when it all makes sense.”

Born and based in London, Harris has dipped in and out of abstraction for much of her young career as an artist, though she traces the current work back to beginning the MA in painting program at the RCA. Half a dozen group shows at tastemaking London galleries also came in 2023, in addition to her debut solo show at Harlesden High Street. That show in particular, “Looking into the Shimmer,” along with presentations of her work at art fairs with Harlesden—including Independent in New York and the new alternative art fair Minor Attractions in London—cemented Harris as a promising emerging painter.

Shards of Grass is one of five works by Harris featured in Harlesden High Street’s Foundations presentation, all of which reflect the artist’s Cuban and Caribbean heritage, as well as her geological, topographical approach.

“As much as I might have adapted a language that is much more scientific, I cannot escape my humanness, that being my identity,” Harris explained, noting that her materials play a large role in communicating her subject matter. “For me, sand allows this exploration of identity geographically but still holds that geological expression that I’m very much interested in.” She sources this fine, powdery sand from the Caribbean, where her family is from, and mixes it into her paints. “The sand I use is a part of the process of building upon a history that’s very slippery, giving my heritage a sort of structural form in my practice.”

It’s abstraction’s depth of possibility and meaning that drew Harris to working in the genre. “I wanted to escape figuration,” she explained, particularly after the work she’d been making as a BA student at Wimbledon College of Arts, which she graduated from in 2020. “I was obsessively painting chiaroscuro garden gnomes whilst studying at Wimbledon and after a while I became disconnected from the subject. Abstraction offered this re-enhanced approach to painting.”

The gnome works—paintings, photography, and film that revolved around the idea of kitsch—as well as figuration more broadly, felt limiting to Harris. “I didn’t feel like I was really using a range of techniques and experimentation that I could do with painting,” she said, “because I do feel like I’m in the contemporary art scene and I wanted to introduce different ways of painting.” Mark Bradford, she said, has been inspiring her most recently, particularly after she saw his show at Hauser & Wirth in New York last spring.

Harris’s impressive leap from figuration to abstraction has paid off, which is evident through her increasingly busy slate of exhibitions, as well as the work itself. Jonny Tanna, co-founder of Harlesden High Street and the Minor Attractions fair, remembered visiting Harris at her studio for the first time, when he saw the painting Collision (2023), “and immediately fell in love.” That hulking work, over six by six feet, busy with stark gesture and color, would be included in her solo show at the North West London gallery. Tanna also realized early on that they had “a shared understanding of what we both wish to achieve and most of it not to do with clout or recognition,” he said. “I immediately felt she was fitting to what we stand for and soon joined our family of artists.”

Harris also noted she got along with Tanna right away, and that she looks for gallerists who respect the time and patience she needs to bring her works to fruition. In a recent group show with the gallery, she was also able to show her installation work—an area of her practice that she’s keen to expand on in the year ahead.