The Wallpaper series is among Harvey’s most pointed engagements with the politics of decorative art. Executed in oil on panel, each work in the series reproduces a motif — here the bluebird — that belongs to the vocabulary of luxury domestic furnishing, specifically to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European wallpaper design of the kind that adorned the interiors of the aristocracy and, later, the aspirant bourgeoisie. The unstated joke is that it is said dismissively of the rich whose homes are decorated by others, including in the selection of paintings, that the art “is just wallpaper to them.” The tautology of hanging a painting as equally “unseen” as the wallpaper whose image it bears is of a piece with the subversive irony that threads throughout Harvey’s multivalent works, laced as they are with societal barbs delivered with singularly original intelligence.
