Andy Harper 'Staghorn'
Andy Harper 'Staghorn'
Artist : Andy Harper
Title : Staghorn
Medium : oil on linen
Dimensions : 90 x 122 cm
ENQUIRE ABOUT THIS WORK
Andy Harper’s intricate oil paintings deal with the fruits of labour in the shadow of uncertainty. On one side they are concerned with the immediate process of painting, the mechanical, almost automated act of laying down mark after mark on a wet surface. On the other hand, they are subject to long-term strategy, each mark developed over time and embedded into a composition that provides an architectural structure for the work. While this framework may be logically ordered, the marks themselves are organic entities, forming a broad visual library that has taken on a life its own, growing through repetition and recombination in each new work. The paintings act like a Petri-dish for the culturing of this visual language, and a greenhouse for its cultivation. The forms may seem organic, but upon closer inspection they are not specific to anything the natural world has to offer. Rather they appear as a synthetic form of nature, generated from compulsive repetition and subjective reinterpretation, a world that has somehow evolved beyond the point of progeny to become its own independent alien entity.