Andrew Vass

Close at Hand

25 January - 8 March 2008

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Veiling 06, 28 x 34cm, 2007, mixed media on paper

The very act of creating a work of art dislocates the artist from society, perhaps even from history, exiles him to the margins where he must stand observant and removed. Andrew Vass’s margin is the edge of the city, outside its walls. With his principle tool, the line – the line is his language – he traces the barrier. He seems to be asking: How is it to be here now? And embedded in this question there is a multitude of other questions: Where to now? Why do I yearn? And from what, for what? And why the sky? Why the solitude? Why the horizon? Why the city? But most consistently, he seems to ask: Why enter? For indeed Vass’s work is contingent on remaining apart from the parade, restricting his meditations to the line until the line becomes an allegory for being, a heart’s pulse, a register of life.

Veiling 03, 52 x 75cm, 2007, mixed media on paper

Although often inspired by places at the fringes of urban centres – a junction, a roundabout – they are not a record or a depiction of specific locations. The sketches, inspired by the discordant geometry of modern urban landscapes, become the backbone, the skeletal beginnings for complex drawings and paintings. In this way Vass is a poet – concerned less with the thing, than what the thing inspires – and a mystic too in his meditations on where he finds himself in the world. This is not to say that his gaze is nostalgic – for as much as they stand against traditional landscape art, his pictures also stand against nostalgia – but he does honour the otherwise overlooked and neglected.

Excerpts from OUTSIDE THE CITY WALL: A Personal Response to the Work of Andrew Vass by Hisham Matar
London, 15 October 2007

Circulate 11, 52 x 75cm, 2007, charcoal on paper

Andrew Vass was born in London in 1961. He attended Cambridge College of Arts and Technology from 1978-1982. Vass lives and works in Ipswich, England.

Night Site 03, 2007, pastel and mixed media on paper, 121 x 152cm