9 October - 16 November 2008
One in the Other is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by Andy Harper.
"Andy Harper’s paintings broadly reference nature but are equally a species of engineering and transformation. It is the very process of painting, of instinctual mark-making, that produces his non-mimetic plants and natural forms – glowing crimson seedpods, uncannily smooth and identical leaves. Yet if figurative painting sublimates a god complex, this deity is not a beatific one; these packed and pressured surfaces engender an airlessness which leaves the viewer little breathing space, an alienated world with no ‘outside’." Martin Herbert
Though appearing to be images of plant life, vegetation and coral organisms the ‘non-mimetic’ effect of Harper’s paintings is brought on by the elucidated tracing of the brush’s interplay with the paint and the canvas. The brush is sometimes a brush, sometimes a homemade tool, or a stream of air from a compressor and, sometimes, just fingers. Harper’s lexicon is a sort of surfeit of what he has not painted, the trace of what has not occurred. Inscribed in transparent, watery ochres, greens and vivid strobes of bright spectrums are textures, veins and structures teeming with fecundity but virtual all the same. The imagery conflates with a type of animation, assimilation and actioning where the manipulation becomes its own narrative, rather than looking passively onto a window of the world reenacted.
Harper often informs his work with references to JG Ballard, in particular his post-apocalyptic novel ‘The Drowned World’ in which the cities of northern Europe and America are submerged in beautiful and haunting tropical lagoons. Titles sometimes carry the names of characters from these works as well as references to parts of the brain that deal with language such as Broca’s Area and Wernicke’s Area. Embedded in the rich tangle of vegetation can be found occasional skeletal motifs and geometric organising structures amongst the fluid swarm of plantlife. Facets of symmetry and mirroring echo the writing and drawing of Leo Lionni who’s work ‘Parallel Botany’ Harper also draws upon for ideas.
Andy Harper had solo shows in London in 2007 at Frost & Reed and 319 Gallery. Recent group exhibitions include John Moore 24, Liverpool; Jerwood Drawing Prize, London; Galway Arts Centre, Galway; Newlyn Art Gallery, Cornwall and Collective Gallery, Edinburgh. His work is currently featured in Drift, Illuminate Productions project for the Thames River. He teaches on MA Fine Art at Goldsmiths College.
Dry Tide 2008
oil on linen
190 x 250cm
The Dancing Plague 2008
oil on linen
190 x 250cm
Life in Between 2008
oil on linen
160 x 200cm
The God Particle 2008
oil on linen
110 x 180cm
Replicator 2008
oil on linen
130 x 130cm
Half Devil, Half Buccaneer 2008
oil on linen
60 x 80cm