Ben Luke

acclaim.

He said that that period of relatively little visibility between the mid-1990s and 2010s afforded him, quote, freedoms to develop, experiment, make mistakes, change, and perhaps find my voice or voices without any spotlight or attention on me.

Even still, there are many paintings made earlier in his career that reflect the intensity, wit and material richness that characterises his work today.

For instance, in illustration for Franz Kafka's story from 2006, his first use of a book cover, he uses the spine to create a divide across an atmospheric interior, strongly reminiscent of post-impressionist artists like Edouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard.

On one side is a couple who appear to be inspecting the insect in Kafka's Metamorphosis that lurks on the other side.

here transformed by Andy into a giant dung beetle, a personal reinterpretation and a deliberate refutation of Kafka's request that his invented creature should never be illustrated.

From the start, Andy clearly wanted to tell stories and what he shares with us varies from work to work, from a mere glimpse to scenes teeming with information from which we might form our own narratives.

The book covers are just one example of Andy's broad approach to materials.

He's used wax and varnish, elements of collage, and deliberately rougher surfaces like coarse hessian, sometimes combining multiple techniques in a single piece.

He's adopted distemper, a water-based medium known for its chalky fresco-like effects, made from pigment and animal glue, as a medium for some paintings, including many of his larger pictures.

Some pieces are clearly made of parts severed from others and brought together.

These all contribute to that sense of Andy seeking to transform disparate thoughts and feelings into matter.

His paintings evoke the textures and condition of memory, how certain images might be exaggerated through recollection, and how we might conflate different memories to create something more imagined than remembered.

He achieves this through a push and pull between painterly experimentation and depiction.

One feels him getting immersed in a particular colour, for instance, and this acts as an invitation for us to do the same.

Indeed, one of the most powerful facets of Andy's output is its generosity.

These paintings relate specifically and often quirkily to one man's experience.

But while they articulate that distinctive worldview, they possess just the right level of universality to lure us in.

Motifs reappear, lending a sense of the familiar, yet always familiarity made strange.

Among his most common recurrent images are landscapes with tents and marvelous vistas, bodies of water leading to a looming rock, beds with heads poking out at the top of a duvet, tabletops with clusters of objects, and studio and domestic interiors.