‘木板2（草）’— 安迪·哈珀
'Panel 2 (Painting/Grass)' are from a series of works made across three decades since leaving college in the mid 90s. The Grass/Paintings marry two schools of contradictory thought. On the one hand they follow strict premeditated ways of making a painting - strongly influenced by a second wave of process painting prevalent in London during the 90s. On the other hand, this process produces, a romantic image of a field of grass, a landscape.
There is a simple conceptual twinning of thousands of brush marks making up the field of a painting, and thousands of blades of grass making up a field of grass. The presence of both artifice and romance, speaks to the nature or culture argument that inhabits both the discourse of painting and the lack of bio-diversity held within a manicured lawn.
On a personal level, I am drawn to these ‘nature’ / 'not nature’ spaces. They were the playing grounds of my childhood. Suburban fields in-between housing estates, carpeted in turf, stretched out in front of me. To my young eyes it was wilderness and loaded with potential.
Andy Harper (b.1971)’s paintings deal with the fruits of labour in the shadow of contradictory forces. On one side they are about the immediate process of painting, the mechanical, almost automated act of laying down mark after mark on a surface. On the other hand, they are subject to long-term strategy and planning, each mark developed over time and embedded into a pre-designed structure that provides an architectural framework for the paintings. While this framework may be logically ordered, the marks themselves are organic entities, forming a broad visual library that seems to have taken on its own life, growing and developing through repetition and recombination in each new work. The paintings act almost like a Petri-dish for the culturing of this visual language, and a greenhouse for its cultivation. The forms may seem organic, but on close inspection they are unrelated to anything the natural world has to offer. Rather they are like a man-made form of nature, generated from compulsive repetition and subjective reinterpretations, a world that has somehow grown past the point of offspring to become its own independent entity.
ndy Harper studied Fine Art at Brighton Polytechnic (BA 90–93) and the Royal College of Art (MA 93-95). After co-founding NotCut studios in London (1996) he also studied Visual Culture at Middlesex University (MA 97-99). He has exhibited in the US, South Korea, Switzerland, Germany, Belgium, Mexico, Sweden, Italy, France and the UK. Harper has taught in many institutions nationally and internationally, and held posts teaching on Fine Art courses at Central St. Martins, The City Lit and is currently a Senior Lecturer on the MFA Fine Art programme at Goldsmiths in London.
