Solo exhibition of the Belgian artist Amber Andrews.

"I don’t think you can ignore art history. As a contemporary artist it’s impossible to shield yourself from your contemporaries, let alone your predecessors. Everything starts with a love for painting, it’s history and key players, but simultaneously it’s also a technical education to study their works. You try to find out what difficulties they encountered and you analyze their solutions, and in this process I experience the same painterly solutions that I applied as well in my works.

The way I relate to art history may form the ground for the series’ thematics, but the subjects I depict are the result of a focused research. History consists out of enigma’s, mysteries and secrets. Painting may be fiction, but its history is real. It’s a tension field that I’m drawn to explore, it is registration and perception combined. In my paintings I depict various subjects, film scenes that are, as it were, paused. In cinema you can only understand the story when you have seen the entire film, but the still image itself has the power to move. In this case it’s a matter of painterly elements such as composition and the use of colors. This way, a narrative inherently comes into being.

I’m not a storyteller. Rather, it adjusts to the contours of a story. The explanatory power of my works remain painterly by nature. I touch upon the same issues literary of perspective, protagonists or techniques, but always in a painterly way. Narratives have always been the breeding ground for painting. I paint the images someone else would narrate. I’m referring to mythology or, for example, Renaissance art because these things move me personally. I’ll start with a well-structured and clear-cut study, which leads to a collection of images. An inventory of words and graphics, which eventually take their shape on canvas."

Artists: Amber Andrews