Descrizione Opera / Biografia
My paintings begin as a dialogue, both with a particular Folk Tale and also with an image from art history – often a painting by an Old Master that may then be used as a starting point from which to playfully but reverently deviate. I am interested in how stories are retold and re-imagined, and how the retelling alters and embellishes the original even as it seeks to render it vital and alive once again for a new audience. Along with this comes a question of how modern developments may be balanced by a dialogue with established traditions and past narratives, and yet not become nostalgic. Whereas in the past, the artist or thinker had the shared symbolic order provided by religion within which to refer and ground their work, the artist today must find a way of surviving the bewildering plurality and subjectivity that has become the norm, if what they have to say is to maintain any force or credibility.
My work has been through a number of changes over the past two years in particular. Previously I would make use of a pre existing image as a starting point, from which several coloured photocopies were made. This image would then be deconstructed and rearranged using scissors and glue, and then reconstructed to form something that had a new life, with its own particular, but connected narrative. This collage would then form the basis for a painting, which was made predominantly using acrylic on linen.
These works were often made in two or three sittings, and there was an attempt to apply the paint in a concentrated, semi conscious way in order to try to get myself as much out of the way as possible as the work was being made. Inevitably this strategy failed spectacularly, and I was often left tinkering and fiddling with areas of the work to add detail and tease out a form that had been recognised and demanded to be attended to. The works were theatrical and melodramatic, and this became something that I grew to enjoy about them, perhaps because it was something that I had not anticipated or lay completely within my control. The sheer enjoyment of making these works was not intended to be an exercise in grand, expressionistic gestures, but was rather an attempt to transform and renew the subject through the act of making.
Peter Fuller talks about how, in the past the artist could ‘transform the physically perceived by the manifestation of allegoric devices like haloes and ‘human’ wings, whereas now this can only be realized through the transfiguration of formal means like drawing, colour and touch’ . The act of making becomes inseparable from the message that is being conveyed through the marks, one of the importance of a vital, living dialogue with the past. The intention was to frustrate the process of recognition through treading a path that played between the borders of figuration and abstraction, and thus slowed down the viewer by creating a space for sensation to emerge.
More recently, although the concerns of the work have remained constant, that is, the desire to retell and re-imagine what is past, and in so doing, to enable it to live again in vital and unexpected ways, the means have altered. The works are now predominantly oils on board, and are constructed without a conscious reference to past imagery. Instead they are perhaps more linked to the narratives and stories that I encounter during my work as an Art Psychotherapist with teenagers, many of whom have tales of neglect and abuse. These stories have very little trouble attaching themselves to the Folk Tales and Faery Stories that I have always been interested in, since the themes of the two; loss and abandonment, the violence of parental figures, oral greed, transformation and renewal, naturally merge into each other.
Paint is now poured and manipulated to create areas of thick and crusted surfaces, that are allowed to wrinkle and pock mark as the various mediums used dry out. Once this process has reached a certain point, the image is again finely adjusted to create areas of shadow and recession, to a point where a form may begin to emerge, but hopefully not too much. The pause button is then pressed, to hopefully allow something to sit forever on the cusp of becoming – neither an abstract blob of raw sienna nor the fold of flesh in a stomach, but both, and neither. This ability to be in two worlds at once, the past and the present, the abstract and the figurative, the imagined and the real, is what interest me and sustains me as an artist, and is the reason that I continue to make paintings.
Iain Andrews – Curriculum Vitae
andrews.iain@yahoo.co.uk
Education
2000 Sheffield University, PG Dip. Art Psychotherapy
1998 University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, MA Painting
Solo Exhibitions
2017 ( Title TBC) – Van der Plas gallery, New York
2015 Changeling - University of York College Gallery
2014 Review : Iain Andrews, Castlefield Gallery, Manchester
2013 Il Teatro dei Leviatano, Man and Eve, London, - The Language of Paint (with
Richard Kenton Webb), The Atkinson Gallery, Somerset,
2012 Mythopoeia, Warrington Museum and Art Gallery
2011 Manchester Contemporary (solo presentation with man and eve), Manchester
2009 Iain Andrews (with Geneive Figgis), Queen Street Studios, Belfast, - Theoria, Gallery
286, London, -The Pilgrimage of Lost Children and Other Stories, Bankley Mill,
2008 The Edge of Figuration, Tregoning Fine Art, Derby
Group Exhibitions
2017 ‘Contemporary British Painting’, Yantai Art Museum, Yantai and touring to Artali Gallery, Nanjing and Jiangsu Art Museum, Nanjing
2016 ‘Correspond’, Artworks Gallery, Halifax and touring to London, Liverpool, Rye and Winchester,‘GMCC Art prizewinners exhibition’, Chamber of Commerce, Manchester, ‘Sixty’, Lubomirov Angus-Hughes, London, ‘Anthology’, Van der Plas Gallery, New York,
‘New Work’, The Manchester Contemporary, ‘Telling tales’, Collyer Bristow, London, ‘Miniature World’, Castlefield Gallery, Manchester
2015 ‘How the Light gets in’, Hay on Wye, ‘Griffin Gallery Open’, Griffin Gallery, London, ‘Open call Bankley’, Bankley Gallery, Manchester, National Open Art Competition, RCA, London
2014 ‘Lost Paradise’, Central Library of Castro Pretorio, Rome Triennale, Rome, - ‘@Paint Britain’ Ipswich Art Gallery, - Contemporary British Painting, Huddersfield Art Gallery, - (DETAIL) , H Project space, Bangkok,(June),Transition gallery, London (September) and Usher gallery, Lincoln (2015) – curated by Andrew Bracey - Open Up North, Brewery Arts Centre, Kendal
2013 Beautiful Things, Next Door projects, Tate Liverpool, - Tip of the Iceberg, Contemporary Art Society, London,
2012 The Wreck of the Imagination, Sarah O’ Kane Fine Art, Lewes - International Beethoven Festival, Chicago, - Polemically Small, Orleans House Gallery, Twickenham - 60 Drawings, Bankley Gallery, Manchester - Put your money where your eyes are, Castlelfield Gallery, Manchester - Pulse Art Fair, New York (with Man and Eve) - Collectible, Zeitgeist Arts Projects, London - A Private Affair, Harris Museum and Art Gallery, Preston -Digital Romantics, Dean Clough, Halifax
2011 National Open Art Competition Prizewinners Exhibition, Pallant House, Chichester -
Something Borrowed, Cultivate, London - The Manchester Contemporary (solo presentation), with Man and Eve, Manchester -The Return : House of the Nobleman, Boswall House, London - Configured, Signal Gallery, London -Jerwood Drawing Prize, London and touring to various venues - Contemporary Approaches to Watercolour, Mall Galleries, London - Polemically Small, curated by Edward Lucie Smith, Garboushian Gallery, LA - Desire, Portman Gallery, London - The Open West, Gloucester Art Gallery, Gloucester
2010 The Marmite Art Prize, Tameside, touring to Coventry and London in 2011 - Crash Salon, Charlie Dutton Gallery -The Borrowed Loop, Man and Eve, London - Summer Show, Tregoning Fine Art, Derby
2009 Salon 09, Matt Roberts Arts, London -New Artists, Newdays Gallery, Surrey -Top 100, Jealous Gallery, London - British Art in the Twenty First Century, Opera Gallery, Hungary
2008 Marmite Art Prize, Studio 1.1, London -Top 100, MCPS/PRS Alliance building and various venues, London -New Blood Art Fair, London -Budapest Art Fair, Hungary - Horse Power, Liverpool Biennale, Edge Hill Station, Liverpool - International Artists, Opera Gallery, Hungary - Add Balance to the Equation, Lloyd Gill Gallery, Somerset - Night Thoughts, Royal West of England Academy, Bath - Imaging the Bible, Aberystwyth Arts Centre, Aberystwyth
2007 From Bacchus to Barbie, Signal Gallery, London - Derby Open, City Art Gallery, Derby - Sefton Open, Atkinson Art Gallery, Southport - SOA Annual Exhibition, Mall Galleries, London
2006 Derby Open, Derby City Art Gallery, Derby
2005 Stations of the Cross, St.Mary’s, Stoke Newington, London - Art Of Imagination, touring European Exhibition – Galerie Venere, Italy - Lofthouse Galerie, Germany - Silos Gallery, Spain - Challenge the Nail, Salon des Arts, London
2004 Candid Arts Trust , London
2003 Art and Vision, touring Exhibition – Williamsburg Art centre, New York – Gallery 37, London – Kircudbright, Scotland - Religion, Art and War, Salon des Arts, London
2002 Eyepoppers, City Art Gallery, Gloucester - Art of Imagination, Gallery 37, London and Goldmark Gallery, Uppingham, Rutland
Competitions, Prizes and Awards
2016 GMCC Arts Prize, runner up, Manchester
2016 Anthology, 1st Prize winner, Van der Plas Gallery, New York,
2014 Open up North, 1st Prize winner, Kendal
2012 Nominated for Northern Art Prize http://www.northernartprize.org.uk/2013-prize/longlist
2011 TOWRY Regional prize – North of England, National Open Art Competition
2011 Marmite Painting Prize, 1st Prize winner, London
2011 Jerwood Drawing Prize, London
2010 Jerwood Painting Fellowship, Shortlist
2009 Best of British, Finalist, Saatchi Gallery, London
2009 Abbey Scholarship Fine Art, Shortlist, British School of Rome
2007 Sir Leslie Joesph Young Artist Award, Finalist - Glynn Vivian Art Gallery,
Swansea
2007 Celeste Art Prize, Shortlist, London
2002 LUKAS Drawing Prize, London
Public Collections
The Progressive Collection, Ohio, USA Warrington Art Gallery
St Paul’s The Crossing, Walsall The New Art Gallery, Walsall
Priseman/Seabrook Collection
Private collections in the U.K, Bolivia, Denmark, U.S.A and Hong Kong.
Selected press / Publications
2015 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/retailandconsumer/11685113/Click-on-the-draw-the-online-gallery-helping-emerging-artists.html
2014 Guardian Guide – Pick of the week’s exhibitions
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/mar/15/this-weeks-new-exhibitions
2014 Let Line Loose – book by David Maclagan published by Reaktion books
2012 Mythopoeia, Exhibition Catalogue with essays by Edward Lucie Smith and Graham Crowley
2012 BBC news http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-19782783
2011 Jerwood Drawing Prize , Exhibition Catalogue
2011 Polemically Small review
http://www.artknowledgenews.com/13_05_2011_22_58_34_polemically_small_art_by_international_artists_at_two_california_venues.html
2011 Front cover, a-n magazine May issue
2011 One to watch, A Kick up the Arts, http://akickupthearts.wordpress.com/2011/04/20/artists-to-watch-6-iain-andrews/
2011 Marmite Painting Prize, Exhibition Catalogue
2011 Editors pick - 10 Top International Shows - Saatchi Online Magazine
2011 One to watch, FAD http://www.fadwebsite.com/2011/02/16/one-too-watch-iain-andrews/
2010 Review of ‘The Borrowed Loop’ , a-n October
2009 School of Saatchi, BBC 2
2009 The Vacuum, Issue 41.
2008 Marmite Art Prize, Exhibition Catalogue with essay by Oliver Kossack
2007 Celeste Art Prize, Exhibition Catalogue
2006 What the world needs now, BBC 1
2003 Religion, Art and War, Exhibition Catalogue, Imperial College London
Talks , Papers and Judging Panels
2015 In Coversation with Richard Davey – Usher Gallery
2014 In Coversation with David Maclagan – Castlefield Gallery
2013 Neo Art Prize, Selection Panel
2012 The Marmite Art Prize –Selection Panel
2011 The Open West 2011 -Selection panel together with Daniel Chadwick
2010 Who cares if it’s Art or not, is it any good? – Liverpool Cathedral
2010 ‘The Good, The True and The Beautiful’ – University of Wales, Aberystwyth
I currently work an Art Psychotherapist and Artist in residence at Trinity Church of England High School, Mossside, Manchester. I have been a visiting lecturer at Aberystwyth School of Art, York College of Art, Leeds University and Cambridge University.
