"The painting assumes the anecdote, that is to say the unedited, which it composes in a precise and unashamed way. Pat Andrea's work is a transcription of human energies and psyche in an almost scriptural manner. This question of the relationship between illustration and writing is therefore particularly relevant in its banishment of classical dichotomies to access more complex phenomena: abstraction / figuration, reality / fiction, reason / imagination. A good painting is not the one that is situated - in a somewhat floating and indecisive way - "between" each pole of these opposites, but rather the one that surprises by linking them in a concrete image.
Elora Weill-Engerer
PAT ANDREA, Solo show 2, avenue Matignon 75008 Paris
05.05.23 – 03.06.23
PAT ANDREA
Pat Andrea is represented by Galerie Laurent Strouk, Paris, Galerie Ramakers, The Hague, Galerie DYS, Brussels, Benveniste Contemporary, Madrid.
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.
