Andrew Bryant Cornwall and Isles of Scilly, United Kingdom
Andrew Bryant (b. 1971) is an artist and mentor based in Cornwall, UK. A former editor for a-n and Tate Online, he holds an MFA from Goldsmiths College and was shortlisted for the Contemporary British Painting Prize in 2022 and 2026. Informed by psychoanalysis, posthumanism and climate change, his work explores how surface and materiality shape perception, exposing and obscuring deeper structures.
My paintings explore how surface, texture and materiality shape—and sometimes distort—our perception of the world. I am interested in how appearances can expose and obscure the deeper structures and dependencies through which objects, images and subjects are formed. Painting slows the image, testing what its surface allows us to see and what it leaves concealed.
Working from printed matter, the internet, photography and AI-generated hybrid imagery, I make paintings and occasional drawings of isolated objects that appear fragile, lacking or incomplete. They seem caught between function and failure, unable to act independently or suspended in a state of unresolved dependency. Their stillness allows uncertainty to gather around their identity, scale and purpose. Through them, I address contemporary fantasies of autonomy and self-sufficiency, while pointing towards the psychic, social, material and ecological conditions those fantasies seek to deny.
For me, painting is a form of translation: a slow, attentive process through which an existing image is remade. I may spend months, sometimes years, on a single work, giving close attention to surface nuance while suppressing the visible trace of the brush or hand. This is less a pursuit of perfection than a means of questioning the value placed on originality, spontaneity and individual authorship. By drawing upon the languages of photography, reproduction and the copy, the paintings redirect attention away from the artist as originator and towards the technological, economic, unconscious and material structures through which images and subjects are produced.
My images often contain elements of staging and framing, subtly referring to art-making itself as a form of address. Like the objects they depict, the paintings remain incomplete, depending upon the viewer to produce meaning. Across the work, I ask what lies beneath appearances and what forms of intelligence, desire and dependency exceed the self-sufficient human subject.
