Up and coming contemporary artists - chosen by experts

Iain Andrews

Practice: painting

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Iain Andrews has serious qualms about the postmodern avoidance of age-old themes - love; mortality; the sacred - and therefore turns to the western art classics which positively pulse, of course, with edifying observations on the human condition.

This, however, is where any real similarity ends; as Andrews explains, "My paintings begin as a dialogue with an image from art history – a painting by an Old Master that may then be rearranged or used as a starting point from which to playfully but reverently deviate."

The results approximate a kind of referential short-hand; a deliciously gloopy, liquidised version of the past that manages to retain all its essential nutrients.

But what about potential discrepancy between the voluptuous paint handling that Andrews embraces, and the definitive guiding principles he wishes to reference?

Although Andrews himself recognises the complexities of "the relationship between the spiritual and the sensual" the answer is that it's an essentially moot point.

Even if we struggle to find a place for unabashed personal pleasure in the moral and spiritual systems at the core of the classical canon, the Old Masters knew full well that in order to edify, the first move was to captivate.