Artist Biography
American painter Andrew Englander (b.1985, Ventura CA), also known as Drew Englander, is currently based in Brooklyn New York, the art capital of the world. He is known for using bold colours, distorted perspectives, and hard-edged chiaroscuro to model various objects and depict scenes. He developed this style naturally over time, a by-product of his speedy gestural drawing. Englander captures big motions at first, then proceeds to the refinement of details for a taste of realism. The contradiction of loose distorted elements and attention to recognisable realistic detail results in the formation of a surreal and often uncanny picture. Englander is greatly influenced by realism, surrealism, cubism and impressionism, summarising his viewpoint as a contemporary magical realism.
Having grown up in New Mexico, Englander describes his hometown as a rural mountain area, right on a river. Englander was surrounded by nature and quite removed from people and culture, relying on imagination and hungrily absorbing any information that trickled in from the outside world. He developed an interest in incorporating the subjects of daily life when he moved to more developed urban areas such as Denver and Brooklyn. He pays attention to digital technology, sports and entertainment, virtual reality, and art history. He does not adhere to a strict palette, instead making color and compositional choices in an automatic way responding to the scenes he draws from life. He starts by identifying the main hue of the object, then explores various possible colour combinations. His free-minded practice gives him a bold palette full of potential. Color is the most emotional visual element for Englander, and he cites hometown as an influence on his color palette. The colors in New Mexico are vivid, crisp, inspiring, and somehow calming. Just how Englander arranges his pictures. Building the compositions of his paintings is like working with an interlocking puzzle. The solutions are found in the work itself, as each portion reacts to another. Working with gestural marks gives his images a messy yet deliberate fluidity which captures the shifting nature of objects and spaces. It is for this reason that drawing is essential to Englanders’ practice, and is the genesis of every painting. Making the painting itself is an exercise in giving this perspective a believable physical presence and unifying the loose elements. Through his paintings, Englander encourages viewers to take a closer look at their own surroundings and consider the fluidity the individual human perspective.
Andrew Englander has participated in solo and group art exhibitions globally. Notable recent shows include Plan X Gallery in Italy and Spain, the Phillips in London, the Antwerp in Belgium and New York City galleries IRL and Under the Oven.