As an artist, Harald Lyth is in a positive sense completely out of date. He is a painter who since the 1970s has been driven by a wonder at the possibilities of the picture room. The work tools are brush, chalk and charcoal on canvas, paper, on the floor or wall. The method is attack and sensitivity, visual listening and reduction until something opens up to the color and its signs.
The great art of Lyth is accuracy. An ability to retain desire and curiosity in the brushstroke, to avoid slackness and pose in a desire for absolute presence in line and color. When Lyth is in his works, physically and mentally, then it is felt in both stomach and head.
Lyth’s painting project is complex. A visual imagination in a state between dream and wakefulness. Always rhythmic and musical. The exhibition at Liljevalchs + is his largest to date, but what is presented on the walls is no art that aspires to revolution, no pamphlet, but only traces of a sensitive person who wants to make us see something else, something more, beyond the determination of things.
Harald Lyth was born in 1937 in Gothenburg and is currently active in Stockholm.
