MARIE HARNETT ASKS IF WE'RE DREAMING AT CRISTEA ROBERTS GALLERY

Marie Harnett's Were you dreaming? at Cristea Roberts Gallery offers a rare opportunity to dwell in the quiet moments that cinema often rushes past: the softness, gentleness, and aching intimacy of love. writes Avantika Pathania.

Were you dreaming? Installation shot. Courtesy of gallery.

In her latest exhibition Were you dreaming? at Cristea Roberts Gallery, Marie Harnett invites us into a realm shaped by the lingering emotions of film, the shadows of myth, and the timeless gestures of classical sculpture and Old Master paintings. It is her fourth solo exhibition with the gallery, and it feels like the culmination of years spent chasing the exact point at which beauty flickers, just before it disappears.

Harnett, born in 1983 in Hertfordshire and trained at Edinburgh College of Art, is known for her meticulous, hyperreal pencil drawings derived from film stills. In Were you dreaming? she presents 25 works that reframe isolated cinematic moments as self-contained vignettes poised between narrative and stillness. Sourced from film trailers, her chosen images are stripped of dialogue and plot, chosen instead for atmosphere and gesture. They often allude to myth, particularly the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, a tale of love, transgression, and irrevocable loss.

Love has always been the great muse, but rarely is it afforded stillness. Film and music accelerate and amplify it. Harnett in her works, instead, slows it to a breath. Her graphite world gives love a kind of privacy which is also delicate, observational, and quiet. This is not love performed, but love recalled.  We spend so much of our lives thinking about love (I know I do); its arrival, its loss, its possibility. And yet, in both life and art, we often fail to catch it in its most truthful form: unspoken, unresolved. That is what Harnett captures. In doing so, she reclaims not just love but our right to linger with it.

From left to right: Love has an earlier death, 2024, You’ve cast a spell, 2024

Though rooted in the aesthetics of Baroque sculpture and the architecture of classical mythology, her works resist nostalgia. She is not recreating the past; she is conversing with it, extracting its timeless gestures and placing them in the fragmented, fleeting present. The effect is uncanny, as though a memory from a 17th century canvas has wandered into a 21st century film still. Even her experiments with photographic negatives such as in Love has an earlier death (c. 2024) and You’ve cast a spell (c. 2024) play with perception, highlighting the sculptural potential of drawing by inverting light and dark.

Despite the scale of the subject, all of the drawings are modest in size and black and white. However, the lack of colour does not dull their beauty but distils it, and ultimately sharpens the viewer’s focus. What remains is an emotional intensity crafted entirely from shade and texture. 

For you alone, 2024

Even the title of the exhibition feels well placed: Intimacy, tenderness, and love are things we often dream about, shaping our own personal versions of them in the quiet moments of yearning. There is a joy in seeing these emotions represented not through grand gestures, but through soft, suspended glimpses. Harnett gives us a vision of love that is heartwarming precisely because it feels honest subtle, unsure, private.

I have loved no one but you, c. 2024

For art and film lovers alike, Were you dreaming? offers a rare opportunity to dwell in the quiet moments that cinema often rushes past: the softness, gentleness, and aching intimacy of love. Marie Harnett’s drawings transform fleeting frames into still worlds, allowing viewers to pause and truly relish the emotional residue of scenes that would otherwise dissolve in seconds. Her work gives love especially the kind often hidden in glances, gestures, and longing a permanence it rarely receives.

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Avantika Pathania is an art writer and journalist.