PAT ANDREA
Pat Andrea explores the possibilities of a true and personal form of painting. It is in fact from intimate life that he draws his subject: his “war of the sexes”, its love affairs and heartbreaks. But through a subjective realism that filters, distorts, distances itself and often, through humour, plays the card of derision. A realism that surpasses the anecdote or naïve illustration to reveal poetry and beauty in triviality. Blending personal and wider history, autobiographical memories and resurgences of myths or political events, Pat Andrea opens the intimate onto the archetypal. His images touch us and are not forgotten. Between desire, fear and violence, they open before our eyes like a small theatre of human behaviour, with all its seductiveness, intrigue and ridicule.
Internationally acclaimed Dutch master painter Pat Andrea is one of the most prominent figures in European magical realism and new figurative iconography. Over a 40-year career, his work has featured in hundreds of exhibitions, including four retrospectives, and appears in some of the most prestigious museum collections in the world, including MOMA (New York), Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (Buenos Aires), Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), and the Kunstmuseum (The Hague).
Born in The Hague in 1942, into a family of artists, Andrea studies at the city’s Royal Academy of Art under Co Westerik. Together with Walter Nobbe and Peter Bloklhuis, he founded in the mid seventies the ABN Group known as The New Hague School. Before that, in 1965, he held his first solo show. After winning, when he was still a student, The Royal Prize for Painting in 1964 and later again in 1972, he was selected in 1979 by the art critic Jean Clair to participate in ‘Nouvelle Subjectivité’ at the Palais de Beaux-Arts in Brussels, alongside artists including David Hockney, RB Kitaj, and Sam Szafran. A teacher at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1998-2007, Andrea now lives and works in Buenos Aires, Paris, and the Hague with his second wife, an established artist in her own right - Cristina Ruiz Guiñazú.
From 1988 - 2007, Pat Andrea worked as an illustrator for Playboy Magazine.
Sexuality, fertility, fear and desire are conjured in Pat Andrea’s magical realist and Neo-expressionist paintings. They are playful yet dark, raw yet delicate depictions of women and men in life and death.
Another series to be mentioned is the one of a group of huge mixed media works on paper (150 x 180 cm) inspired by Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, which Pat Andrea produced between 2003 and 2005 and that will be the starting point of a book edited by Diane de Selliers and for a travelling exhibition around the world between 2006 - 2016.
In describing Andrea’s work, Anna Printezi, curator of Greece’s Frissira Museum, stated: The love-making heroes of Pat Andrea may cause the pompous to laugh, or again they may bring a smile to the viewer who witnesses the joy of realisation and redemption, the joy of sexual pleasure.
