|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Andrew Young’s exhibition
Harbour presents paintings spanning the past two decades of the artist’s
career. The core of the show is a series of twenty-three new collages of
hand-painted papers, which now make their debut in the United States. Seen
together with examples of Young’s earlier egg tempera panels and selected
works in other media, these paintings demonstrate both a continuity of
idea and an evolution of form.
The result of a slow process, meditative and intimate, Young’s work preserves a quieter human attentiveness. There is a materiality to the work that lends an identity and history to each piece and its elements. We are not so far removed, Young suggests, from our organic past and physical surroundings. Young’s art emerges from all the introspective impulses (memory, desire, loss, love), physical gestures (turning, reaching, flattening, sorting), and sensory faculties (sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell) through which he knows the world. If we follow him in believing that these are universal aspects of the human condition, we can find in his art a vision of corporeal and conceptual integration with nature. Documents of his moments of discovery, Young’s works may in turn prompt a discovery, or recovery, on the part of a viewer. Artistic creation is an homage to natural creation, a response to its complexity, continuity, mystery, and mutability. Young, eternally curious about the world and our place in it, finds infinitely varied ways in his art to express wonder and seek connection. He draws upon tradition while speaking to the present, searching the past for the possibility of new expression. The artist must enter the studio every day with the conviction that, as he responds to each opportunity for change, he incrementally shapes a larger body of work—that he will find new ways to portray an enduring sensibility. Gathered here as if in a safe harbor, Andrew Young’s work makes an essential and inspiring statement about natural origins and human aspirations. |
 |
 |
|
Egg tempera on wood panel |
Egg tempera on wood panel |
|
|
