Andy Harper

Born 1971 in Bristol, U.K.

 

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)



Andy Harper, The Dancing Plague, Oil on linen, 2008.