Claudia Hart

In 2014, Hart held her third solo exhibition at bitforms gallery in Chelsea, New York. The works shown were inspired by Lewis Carroll's 1865 Alice in Wonderland and apply the metaphors in the text to explore the increasing mediation of contemporary life through digital platforms and technology. "I started working in a kind of hyper-feminine way," said Hart. "I was dealing with ideas of beauty in the context of first-person shooter games that were fast and violent and pornographic. In resistance, I started making slow sensual work, focusing on the female body." At the core of this work are issues of representation, as Hart questions what might be considered "natural", and the role of the computer in shifting values about identity and the real.

Hart returned to New York in 1998 to publish two illustrated books, originally catalogs for her exhibitions. She wrote, illustrated and designed A Child's Machiavelli, published by Abbeville, Penguin and Nautilus, and Dr. Faustie's Guide to Real Estate Development, published by Nautilus. Hart then studied animation at New York University Center for Advanced Digital Applications with the intention of animating her illustrated books. Instead, she developed a body of work consisting of 3D-animated installations that she thinks of as temporal paintings.

In 1988, Hart began to exhibit with the Pat Hearn Gallery, moving from critical to artistic practice. At that time, she exhibited paintings and installations inspired by the visionary architectural languages of Ledoux, Boullee and Leque. After receiving an NEA Fellowship in 1989, she moved her practice to Europe where she spent ten years and received numerous fellowships, including the Kunstfond Bonn, Stiftung Kulturfonds, the Stiftung Luftbrueckendank Grant, the Arts International Foundation Grant, the Kunstlerhaus Bethanian grant, two fellowships from the American Center in Paris, and an honorary fellowship at Eyebeam.

After graduating cum laude from New York University with a BA in art history in 1978, Hart studied architecture at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture and received a MS in 1984. She then practiced as an art and architecture critic. In 1985-86, she was associate editor of I.D. magazine (then Industrial Design magazine) where, along with the senior editor Steven Skov Holt, she redeveloped it as ID: the Magazine of International Design. She published her critical writings widely and went to Artforum magazine where she was reviews editor until 1988. She continues to write critically but in the academic context, and continues to publish theoretical papers in academic journals such as Media-N, the New Media Caucus journal, Bad Papers and Byte Shark.

Claudia Hart (born 1955 in New York, NY) is an artist and associate professor in the Department of Film, Video, New Media, Animation at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois. She is represented by bitforms gallery, New York. Hart has been active as an artist, curator and critic since 1988. She creates virtual representations that take the form of 3D imagery integrated into photography, animated loops and multi-channel animation installations.