ANDREW HARDWICK

Andrew Hardwick's often large scale, sedimentary paintings display his captivation with wilderness zones; both natural and man-made. Playing with and subverting traditional notions of romantic landscape painting and the sublime. The paintings often depict edge-land zones around big industrial conurbations or ports, such as large-scale car storage compounds, redundant factories and polluted waste lands. Other works draw inspiration from the more typically idyllic locations such as Dartmoor and Bodmin Moor. However, these landscapes are also filled with reminders of human interference. Roads cris-cross the moor in deeply scratched lines, a narrow road is etched into an otherwise massive moorland triptych, likewise a real car radiator sits in the surface of a painting’s as if decaying and buried by the earth. His medium of working is also atypical, paintings are heavily layered with different types of paint (often sourced from recycling centre), plaster, plastics, soils, pigments, roofing felt, hay and other unconventional materials. To this rich surface relevant artefacts are often added, creating reminders or triggering memories intrinsic to a particular landscape...

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The concept of layering in the landscape arrived partly a result of the artist’s childhood, during which his family’s farm was first sliced in half by the M5 motorway and then again by the Royal Portbury Dock. The land once filled with sheep has become a pure edge-land wilderness with detritus of the developments now filling the land. Hardwick’s entire oeuvre makes reference to concepts of change, memory, history and emotion. Ever redolent is the notion that we are but another layer in time.

Andrew Hardwick is a British artist born in Bristol, England in 1961 where he still resides. He achieved an MA in Fine Art at the University of Wales. He is an elected Academician at the Royal West of England Academy. He has featured in four solo exhibitions at Anima-Mundi. Works have been exhibited extensively including numerous public shows and have been collected worldwide.