Hansel and Gretel (after Caspar David Friedrich)

Iain Andrews

60 x 50 cm | 23 x 19 in

Tags: Broad Brushstrokes

'Hansel and Gretel (after Caspar David Friedrich)', painting in acrylic on canvas. Andrews was recently featured in BBC 2's School of Saatchi as one of 12 emerging artists shortlisted by Charles Saatchi for the series. His work is concerned with the struggle to capture the relationship between the spiritual and the sensual, apparent opposites that are expressed in his work through the conflict of high narrative themes and sensuous painterly marks.

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Iain Andrews

A furious war between fairy tales, classic children's literature, and confessionalism flourishes into life when this exquisitely talented artist steps up to the canvas. In Lewis Carroll’s classic piece of literary nonsense, Alice followed a little white rabbit into Wonderland (well, he was wearing a waistcoat)….but that was all so last year. Now, it’s all about following a sinister looking toad into The Undoing, or rather, the explosive imagination of award winning painter, Iain Andrews.

Experiencing a piece of Andrews’ work is like taking a leap of faith from your stalwart perch in reality and plummeting into the true madness that can lurk within the human psyche. The artist himself discusses how he has strived to capture the ‘relationship between the sensual and the spiritual,’ otherwise known as René Descartes mind-body dualism, a mental phenomenon that alludes to the possibility that the mind and body are separable entities. An incredible amount of inventive thought has clearly gone into the composition of each of Andrews’ pieces and it is not hard to imagine why he was awarded first place in Open up North, the Marmite Painting Prize, and the Towry Prize.

One of the most scintillating features of Andrews’ work is his ever-changing pallet. Take the colours we see in There Your Heart Will Be Also. The hues of this piece are so dazzling that they cease to be acrylics on a canvas, and become as natural as real flowers with fleshy petals, this leaves us with a canvas of organic blooms. However, if we turn to a piece such as The Temptation of Sir Anthony and Other Stories X, we find this dry looking landscape washed in sepia ink and we get a sense of solemnness, of time passing…

Iain Andrews is an extraordinarily talented and thought provoking artist who can be found showing his work at this year's Venice Bienniale.