TURN Gallery presents New Dawn Fades, a solo exhibition of new works by Andy Mister. In this series of drawings, Mister explores how the historical subjects of painting - still life, figures, interiors - can be reinterpreted through his own visual language informed by the aesthetics of graphic design, ‘70’s movie posters, and punk album covers. Continuing to investigate the boundary between mechanical and manual reproduction, he works with appropriated images of vintage photographs, deftly mimicking the Xerox aesthetic by hand, using only carbon pencil, charcoal and acrylic. In doing so, Mister draws attention to the way these source images are created through an accumulation of abstract shapes. The pieces function as abstractions as much as realist renderings - a mountain or a crowd becomes an uncountable number of shapes that the eye puts together to form an image.


For this exhibition, Mister has chosen a limited palette of cyan, pink, and violet to create a conversation and force relationships between disparate subjects. Here his female figures are from a book on erotic massage from the ’70’s, whereas his flowers are from the book Rose for English Gardens published in 1902. The images are cropped and altered to highlight parts of the photograph that were not central to the original framing. By playing with these aesthetic frames, he hopes to create liminal images that appear simultaneously dated, and out of time. Capturing moments before or between, Mister creates an anticipation of an event, or the calm after an event has passed, like the sensation of falling asleep or awaking from a dream.


SELECTED PRESS

Quiet Lunch, May 18, 2018