Andrew Szczech
Degree: MA Fine Art
University: City & Guilds of London Art School
Graduation Year: 2021
New Blood Art Commentary
After selling out his MA exhibition (2021), Andrew has new work on show.
Pigments – eroding, sedimenting, tectonic – trace Andrew Szczech's paintings, in meandering, looping mosaics, or swathes like layers of water. The eye plunges into the contemplated object and drifts across its surface. Here the experience of looking is both sensuous and deconstructed: your gaze is reflected back at you. The colours of these works float between being organic and more painterly, occupying an amniotic zone. The aesthetic is historical in the same sense British artist Rachel Whiteread’s sculptures or electronic musician William Basinski’s seminal compositions are: as a poetry of dissolution.
Andrew is interested in the alteration of structures, both literal and social, that house the human body at this moment in time. The forces of breakdown are equalled by those of construction; those of dissolution by creation. There is an openness to his paintings: abstract, they allow for freedom in emotional response. Utopia is implicit: for the looker to question, not the artist to dictate. Using gesso to meticulously prime the canvas allows for paint to be activated and manifest the asymmetrical – though not disordered – forms patterning the works, making a living epidermis of the canvas.
Artist Statement
At the core of my practice is the search for a visual language, using the traditions of painting, to respond to the way societal structures and systems are breaking down all around us. I have become specifically interested in the ideas of broken physical and socio-political utopias. My latest works include responses to English wallpapers dating between 1890 and 1920 from the V&A's extensive archive - chosen as they are symbolic of Britain at the height of its empire. My intention is to produce works that represent an emotional response to place and concept. Cracks sprawl across the works, curving, jittery, crazed. These cracks evoke distorted modernist grids and broken flesh. Surface is attacked, broken down, then polished, cherished, caressed and cosseted. These are infused with notions of permanence and impermanence to invoke these ideas of broken utopias.
A sense of beautiful melancholy pervades the work.
Solo Exhibitions
(2018) Six, St Albans, Herts
(2012) Herts Open Studios, St Albans, Herts
Group Exhibitions
(2024) The Dark and the Light, One Paved Court, London
(2024) What Are You Looking At?, Maison Pan, London
(2024) Circle Box, Limehouse Basin, London
(2023) Corpus, Hypha, London
(2022) Fissured Realms, D Contemporary, Mayfair, London
(2021) CGLAS MA Show, CGLAS, London
(2021) CGLAS 2020 Showcase, Bargehouse, London
(2021) CGLAS MA Interim Show, CGLAS, London
(2020) Visionaries, Landsec, London
(2020) Collective Contemporaries, Online, Online
(2020) Final, not Over, Unit 1 Gallery, London
(2020) Hertfordshire Open, St Albans Museum, St Albans
(2019) CGLAS Fine Art Group Show, Art Hill Gallery, London
(2019) Artist in Residence, Cass Art, London
(2018) Shadowbox, Former Newington Library, London
(2017) National Open Art Exhibition, Oxo Tower, London
(2005) Roffi and Szczech, Gallerie San Roch, Céret, France
(2004) Discerning Eye Exhibition, Discerning Eye, London