Andrew Hollis
Artist born in South Africa in 1974. Since graduating in 1996 I have been making art, mainly in the form of paintings, participating in 1997 in No 4, a human rights exhibition held at the Old Fort in Johannesburg. In 1999 I had my first solo exhibition of paintings, held at the AVA in Cape Town. In 2000 left South Africa. Since then I have traveled extensively, mostly in Europe and Latin America, producing artwork: paintings, sculpture, photography and, more recently, videos, and have shown work in London, Hamburg, Israel, Czech Republic and Guatemala.
ARTIST STATEMENT.
"My work deals with concepts of identity and anonymity, with the dialogue between the internal and the blind external gaze.
In the last two years I have become increasingly interested in developing painting processes and systems with which to take the individual out of the figurative back to the human, to get to a point beyond relating a story or capturing a moment.
I have wanted to lose the moment, to empty the painting of the specific to describe the universal, to create a testimony of a shared experience.
I am interested in the way the personal can be hidden or denied, being superficially deceptive to be truthful, giving information through the removal of information.
I want to portray neither the visual reality of the subjects, nor the idea of the subject, but rather a concept made visible through the distortion of the subject.
I want the subject of the painting to no longer reside in the painting but to reside in the loss of the subject's identity.
What I have attempted is the alignment of figurative painting practice with a more historical and natural perspective."
The current work of artist Andrew Hollis consists of a series of depictions taken from encyclopedic iconographic indexes or yearbooks (or photographs thereof) of people, animals or inanimate objects, rudimentarily placed within a landscape-like surface-base. All these iconographic reproductions, taken exclusively from encyclopedias and yearbooks prior to 1989, a year representative of the continuous evolution of a common visual reality, were chosen and combined with each other, so that the resulting image shows a series of images without any visual or contextual relationship.