50 x £50

An artwork of this size by Andrew Hardy normally sells for £400. You can see more of his work at his website and Instagram. 

Andrew's two main concerns in this work were repetition and the tension between chance and control. The question asked was: ‘At what point does the painter surrender control to chance occurrences and surprises and how much does the painter then intervene… if at all?’ The controls in this painting were the dimensions and materiality of the surface, the choice of paint, mediums and method of application. Chance determined outcome with no subsequent intervention to make corrections.

Andrew Hardy paints in an abstract language, using abstraction to work through broader questions of materiality, repetition, gesture and chance. His process is a form of performance. It is about the act of painting and he sees each painting as a recording of the journey he has been on with it. The question of content is not in the foreground. The emphasis is on form, materials and processes.

The artist says of his paintings, "I don’t feel a need to depict people or things or to be in any way referential whether literal, stylised, imagined or metaphorical. Equally my work has no message or identifiable meaning. It comes from the mind more than from observed reality and refers only to itself, to nothing but its own making. The emphasis is on 'painting as object' with no narrative and I seek to make work that is able to draw viewers in to question and enjoy its materiality and facture. Viewers seem to have a constant need to find meaning and create associations. My work does not have any ‘meaning’ although I do want it to be ‘meaningful’… which is a different thing”. - Andrew Hardy, 2020.