Andrew North

Seven New Paintings

28 June—9 August

South Parade is pleased to present Andrew North’s second solo exhibition at the gallery.

Andrew North’s practice is one of palimpsests, marks built upon previous marks, paintings over paintings abandoned, now unearthed and brought to the fore. Herein unfurls a personal history — retrospective, thoughts of mortality and one’s pedestrian movements. As though the domestic a still life vignette, a silhouette turned away in the aftermath of a conversation; a suggestion of floral forms spilling over a kitchen vase. Elsewhere, cadmium yellow softly exposes an espied tree. A personal history, but one entrenched in the world outwards, towards the town, the city, plains beyond. Vistas nurtured and pastoral, in friction against thoughts of geographies torn. Landscape and people, anthropologies negotiated. Notations in oil paint baring stillness and rupture, ruin and reconciliation. Conjured after encountering something that moves the artist. A search for truth-telling, for intimacies. Something has happened.

Temporal traces in the studio come, North working back over images stored there after a gradual return. Sometimes he arrives to a final outcome by cropping a pre-existing scene, attentive to the fragmented, re-worked canvas, presenting a shift in perspective. He questions, changing and adjusting subject matter with renewed emotion and interest. Rigour is evident in these works, with North’s touch across the entirety of his picture-making, from stretcher construction to framing. Temporality is felt in the textures too, surfaces arising from canvas material chosen but also from wet painted canvases acquiring sawdust and remnants from the studio’s environment itself, each painting embodying the space in which its image is born. Upheld is a potentiality through his making, works igniting the imagination in what can substitute conventional paint, how alternative substances might sculpt a visual form.

Works are process-led, bleeding out monochromatic and textured, skin-like with daubs that strike as birthmarks or aged lines. Scraped and bruising pigments to blushing swathes. Hazy arcs of lightweight brushstrokes as backdrops, before surer strokes are applied; daubs of white to pink to glowing orange and blue, flickering flames of vigour. Swells emerge madder-red to ochre, deepening green to paling blue, dusk’s grey. Time is felt in the palette adopted; works’ colours fan out the way light delineates one’s day, warm hues with a rising sun before cooler tones at nightfall. With each piece assembled to a similar scale, the works in the show strike as both independent moments to engage with and segments making up one holistic body — of time, light and presence.

North’s works are quietly insistent, that you spend time with them and draw close, slow in their revealing, making, thinking. These are provisional paintings, no grandiose pictorial. Provisionality pervades the canvases, works appearing dashed-off and tentative; small acts of negation. Adjustments replete with a longing for authenticity and purpose. One might argue they express a struggle with a medium that at times feels overly invested in permanence and virtuosity, in carefully planned-out compositions and layered meaning. North seeks a resistance to sensationalising, his pieces on the edge of their own collapse, open to undoing, readied for revision.

The works hold a subtleness to them, but they are assertive and honest, constantly expressing the impossibility of painting free of re-addressals and accidents, laying bare the seams and many attempts within a practice. Through this honesty, an interpersonal relationship is encouraged between the painting and viewer, an instilled hope in the second life of an image, of a chance to try again. One senses a courage to lose an image and embrace the possibility that something might fail. To lose oneself to life’s many impermanences. This a show of continuations, a marker in North’s practice, ongoing in spite of the paintings’ concrete exhibited position. Works hang tangible in the space, but are simultaneously placeholders for perpetual progression, susceptible to being experienced differently with every viewer. They are quiet, but move with a flurrying motion that intensifies the longer one looks, like a swirling wind over paths traversed, or sparks of light, mid-air sensations alighting on the retina like breath. Exhalations in colour, hints of life felt across spheres of then and now.

Andrew North (b. 1989, Cheshire) lives and works in Leicestershire. North paints on a variety of surfaces encompassing themes of memory, time and place. Rural and urban landscapes, architecture, nature and sometimes figures are motifs that reoccur. His work shifts between moments of representation and abstraction in a painting practice that involves the entirety of picture making from stretcher construction to framing. Often overpainted, cropped, punctured or texturised, the pictures probe the foundations of easel painting. Fading and transitory, the works arise from a recorded experience of the world we inhabit, conjuring up new formations on the canvas through a combination of the observed and the act of painting.

Recent solo exhibitions include Surfacing, South Parade (London, 2023). Recent selected group exhibitions include A separate Place Between the Thought and Felt, South Parade (London, 2024), Surface Series Signs, Trace Gallery (Nottingham, 2023), The Room, South Parade (London, 2022) , Kill or Cure, Wolfson College (Cambridge, 2022) and Between Shan Shui, 1974 Club (London, 2022) and The Royal Scottish Academy New Contemporaries (Edinburgh, 2013). Since 2021, North has been a Visiting Lecturer at Nottingham Trent University and has delivered lectures at Loughborough University School of Art and Design.