Andrew Bryant was born in the UK in 1971 and lives and works in Cornwall. He has been an art educator and a freelance editor (for a-n and Tate Online). Having worked across a multiplicity of mediums he now predominantly paints. In 2022 he was shortlisted for the Contemporary British Painting Prize. He is a visiting tutor at Newlyn School of Art. His work is in private collections in the UK and abroad.

Andrew’s ideas are informed by a deep interest in critical theory, queer theory and psychoanalysis, as well as his life-long engagement with art and image-making. By subtly blending the narcissism of wishful thinking with the disappointment of experience, his work allegorically explores contemporary neoliberal fantasies of self-sufficiency and the actual psycho-social dependencies they aim to deny. His new series Nothing makes itself extends these concerns to explore our disavowed dependency on the planet and its environments.

Gathering resources from print, the internet, and his own photography, Andrew creates detailed paintings of isolated objects, all of which are in some way lacking or incomplete. Fragile, without the means to propel themselves, or missing an important part, they long for the completion of their function. His images often include a component of staging and framing—of conscious presentation—a reference to art-making itself which, as a form of address, depends on a viewer to provide meaning, and so is equally lacking. By choosing to make paintings of things that have themselves already been made—either by hand, by industrial processes, or in his recent work by immense geological forces—Andrew is always asking what it means to make or to create: who really is the author; what structures and forces—social, psychical, political—beyond the individual, are at play? For Andrew these concerns articulate the true condition of the modern neoliberal individual—that we are radically dependent, and that we are produced by, and subject to, forces beyond our understanding or control.

Spending months and years on a single work, Andrew goes to great lengths to erase the traces of brush or hand. However this is no senseless striving for perfection. Having started out as a photographer, Andrew’s work is still very much in dialogue with that medium. By referencing photography’s discursive spaces through the suppression of painterly gestures, the contemporary fetishes of ‘originality’, ‘spontaneity’ and the ‘hand-made’ are rejected in favour of the ‘mechanical’ and the ‘copy’. This strategy enables Andrew to draw attention away from himself and the process of painting, directing it instead at the chosen objects, allowing their allegorical meanings to come to the fore. Yet this attempt at self-effacement itself exposes Andrew’s desire for mastery and recognition, articulating gesturally one of the central paradoxes of his work. Namely, the potentiality of artistic/human desire and the elusiveness of its fulfilment. 

Education

  • 2012 MFA Fine Art, Goldsmiths, University of London

  • 2001 Post Graduate Diploma Narrative Writing, University of Derby

  • 1996 BA (1st class hons) Photographic Studies, University of Derby

  • 1992 BTEC Foundation in Art and Design, Tresham College, Kettering

Awards and bursaries

  • 2022 Shortlisted for the Contemporary British Painting Prize

  • 2021 Shortlisted for Wells Art Contemporary

  • 2021 Long-listed for the Jackson’s Painting Prize

  • 2021 Newlyn School of Art, One Year Mentoring Bursary

  • 2000 ACE creative writing bursary, Arts Council England

  • 1995 Exchange Scholarship, Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem

  • 1993 Winner, best use of alternative media, Leicester Picture House Artists Book Prize

Selected exhibitions

  • 2024 Ud Rocashaas, Hweg, Penzance

  • 2023 Rapture, Tremenheere Gallery, Gulval

  • 2022 Contemporary British Painting Prize (shortlisted artist), Huddersfield Art Gallery and Thames-side Studios Gallery, London

  • 2022 Unstable Monuments, Bristol

  • 2022 Rhizome, Tremenheere Gallery, Gulval

  • 2022 Group show, Chapel House, Penzance

  • 2021 In the Shadow of the Object (solo exhibition), Dust: The Art of Grief, Penzance

  • 2021 Wells Art Contemporary (shortlisted artist), Wells Cathedral, Wells

  • 2018 Open Studios, Old Bakery Studios, Truro

  • 2016 Open Studios, Old Press, St. Austell

  • 2012 Q-Art, APT Gallery, London

  • 2011 Skin Job (curator), Core Gallery, London

  • 2010 The Eighteenth Emergency (curator), Core Gallery, London

  • 2010 Q-Art, Matt Roberts Gallery, London

  • 2010 Presequel (curator), Goldsmiths College, London

  • 2010 B-sides, Goldsmiths College, London

  • 2007 Total Image Nation, Chocolate Factory, London

  • 2007 Illuminations with (Carol Marin-Pache), My Life in Art, London

  • 2003 Punctuation Marks, Leicester City Gallery

  • 2003 You Are Here, various venues, Nottingham

  • 2001 This is Not Home (solo show), Q Studios, Derby

  • 2000 Turning the Page (winner: Best alternative media artist’s book prize), Picture House Gallery, Leicester

  • 1999 Intimate Land (solo show), Big Blue Cafe Gallery, Derby

  • 1999 Cracking Up, Pink House, Nottingham

  • 1997 Notes in Passing, Picture House Gallery, Leicester

  • 1997 Young Photographers, Montage Gallery, Derby

  • 1993 Two Photographers, Picture House Gallery, Leicester

Published writing

  • 2013 Birds of a Feather, a-n Magazine, April 2013

  • 2012 A Good Blog, a-n Magazine Jan 2012

  • 2011 Artists Talking… Talking, a-n Magazine Nov 2011

  • 2010 The Teaching and Learning of Art; or How to Avoid Being Eaten by a Giraffe, Esferapública Columbia, June 2010 (first appeared in Q-Art London, 2009 and Hit and Miss 3, 2009)

  • 2009 Why Professional Artists Need a Blog, a-n June 2009

  • 2008 Artists Talking — Internationally, a-n magazine September 2008

  • 2008 The Show Must Go On, a-n magazine July/August 2008