Michael Andrews

Gagosian London is pleased to announce an exhibition of paintings by the late Michael Andrews (1928–1995).

For the last twenty-five years of his life, Andrews was preoccupied with four series of landscapes—Lights, Scotland, Ayers Rock/Australia, and English Landscape—as well as School, a series depicting different groups of fish. In this exhibition, selected works from the five related series will be presented through the lens of three elemental themes: earth, air, and water.

Though associated with painters of the so-called School of London, such as Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Leon Kossoff, and Frank Auerbach, for their exploration of the human form and eschewal of abstraction, Andrews produced radically different work. With a few exceptions, his paintings after 1970 are devoid of people, though not without an implied human presence or drama.

The heightened or dreamlike realism that Andrews achieved after 1970 was partly the result of his painting with a spray gun and water-based acrylic paint, which allowed him to cover the canvas with large expanses of a single color, from airy and atmospheric to intense and saturated. No other British artist in the second half of the twentieth century has immersed himself in the elements of landscape to such an extent. “It seems to me impossible not to paint religious landscapes of aboriginal Australia,” he wrote in 1986, “just as it is almost impossible not to paint historical landscapes in Scotland.”