Henry Ward is a painter, living and working in London. He was shortlisted for the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize in 2018, 2019 and 2022 was included in the Wells Contemporary and both the BEEP Painting Biannual, Swansea in 2020 and the BEEP again in 2022. Also in 2022 he featured in the inaugural Football Art Prize at Touchstones, Rochdale.

Recent exhibitions include Sid Motion Gallery, London; Aleph Contemporary, London; Messums London and Flowers Gallery. In 2023 he will be artist in residence at The Albers Foundation, Connecticut USA. The first substantial book on his work, “Shed Paintings – Henry Ward”, about the paintings on paper he made in his shed during the first six months of lockdown in 2020 was published in early 2021.

He is Director of Freelands Foundation and works as a visiting lecturer at art schools across the UK including Brighton, Plymouth, Wolverhampton and Manchester. He teaches at the Turps Banana Art School. He has spoken internationally on approaches to art education and worked as an advisor for the Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin.

Artist Statement: “I work primarily as a painter, but also make drawings and small sculptures. I am interested in exploring the language of paint by investigating the threshold between abstraction and representation. I maintain three specific sites of practice; my kitchen table, where I make small objects, my shed, where I paint on paper, and my studio. These three spaces create an ongoing dialogue between different ways of working and different paces. The paintings in the shed are rapidly made, with intuitive revisions and reworkings. The more realised works, made over longer periods of time in the studio, are informed by both these and the small objects.

I am interested in making paintings that refer to objects and spaces in the real world without being nameable, I want things to feel familiar and alien at the same time. I am fascinated by paint and the way in which it can do multiple things simultaneously, being both material on a flat surface and creating the illusion of space.”

Henry Ward showed a selection of paintings in Irving Contemporary’s exhibition SHAPESHIFTERS (February-March 2023).