Charles Harlan is a New York based sculptor, born in 1984 in Georgia, USA and this will be his first solo show in the UK where he will be taking over the two main spaces of Carl Kostyál’s London gallery. Harlan uses found or industrial materials such as stones, bricks, wire fencing or, in the case of this show, old iron baths. He has had solo shows in New York (including JTT, Karma and Venus Over Manhattan) and Belgium (Rodolphe Janssen) and has been in too many group shows to list here, but they include locations such as David Zwirner, NY, Atlanta Contemporary Art Centre, Martos Gallery (curated by Bob Nickas), Socrates Sculpture Park (curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist) and Maccarone, NY.

There is a word that comes up in a conversation between Charles Harlan and Carol Bove (published in Flash Art, Jan 2016) that I had to look up, the word was koan.

koan
noun...a paradoxical anecdote or riddle without a solution, used in Zen Buddhism to demonstrate the inadequacy of logical reasoning and provoke enlightenment.

My favorite koans are the ones that end with some poor monk getting slapped. Because so much of Zen relies on negating learned understanding, we have to ask the master what is left after everything has been negated. The master replies with a slap, which is neither affirmation or negation, but pure experience and pure understanding. The slap is a way to break through mediated experience into enlightenment, which seems like a good aspiration for art making.