Iain Andrews – Il Teatro del Leviatano at Man&Eve

I first noticed Iain Andrews on the short-lived TV art ‘reality’ show School of Saatchi  in 2009. Having picked him out as a potential winner he was of course immediately axed after the first show. My other pick, Saad Qureshi, lasted a little longer before being booted out, but was quickly picked up by the Mayfair based Gazelli Art House where he is doing very well indeed. Incidentally not much seems to have happened to the eventual winner Eugenie Scrase – forcefully steam-rollered in by Emin. She has a website but, it seems, no gallery.

Man & Eve , a Kennington gallery who pick up a lot of early career graduates, signed up Andrews a couple of years back. This is his first solo show for them. Andrews’ early works originate through dialogue with particular paintings from the canon of art history which he transcribes so that his canvases contain reference to them, whilst disturbing and animating the source. His technique runs from broad and gestural to fine and delicate, clearly unafraid of using bold colours that sweep across his canvases.

Il Teatro dei Leviatano is both a development of and departure from Andrews’ earlier paintings. At the centre of this new body of work is an intricate miniature theatre – another vehicle through which he considers different historical art movements.

Peter Fuller wrote about how, in the past, an artist could “transform the physically perceived by the manifestation of allegoric devices like haloes and ‘human’ wings, whereas now this can only be realised through the transfiguration of formal means like drawing, colour and touch”. In Andrews’ work, the act of making becomes inseparable from the message that is being conveyed through the marks, one of the importance of transformation and redemption.

Andrews’ states that his work illustrates the “struggle to capture the relationship between the spiritual and the sensual, apparent opposites that are expressed in my work through the conflict of high narrative themes and sensuous painterly marks.”

Iain Andrews – Il Teatro dei Leviatano, Man & Eve
Exhibition runs 2nd November — 14th December 2013

Private View Friday 1st November 6 — 9pm
Exhibition open Tuesday — Saturday, 11am — 6pm