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

Neural Plasticity

Andy Harper utilises paint as if he is physically constructing the dense, wild environment portrayed in his paintings. Using rich colour and mesmerising, illusionistic depth, Harper draws the viewer into a beautiful yet dark, unsettling world. Through the repetition of brushstrokes he builds up a complex vision of weeds, grasses and seedpods. Multiple layers of intense and mysteriously produced imagery casts doubt over the innocence of the wild-life emerging from the painted surface. It is almost too good to be true, and as the eye discovers a hint of human remains the viewer is left wondering if these smooth, beguiling natural forms are as harmless as they first appeared.

- Rebecca Darch

Strangman

Recent Exhibitions
2009 The Persecution, One in the Other, London
2008 New Paintings, One in the Other, London
2008 This is not a fairy tale, Patrick Heide Gallery, London
2008 Whispers of Immortality Natalia Goldin Gallery, Stockholm
2008 Drift, an Illuminate Productions project for the River Thames

Andy Harper's website