Andrew Bick: 'Concrete-Disco-Systems'

About

Andrew Bick’s paintings consist of endless permutations - at the core of the artist’s practice is a grid system, one he reproduces time and time again. In 2008, Bick copied a grid structure from one of his own artworks, digitised it, and has since used this same grid as a starting point for every painting. In Bick’s view, new versions of the abstract, concrete and constructive, necessitate the repetition of banal information, leading to an unexpected conjuncture of word and image.  His work is based on the belief that disruption within a system helps us relearn the process of paying attention.

In Bick’s work, mediated layering of geometry and gesture act as an antidote to a world of instantaneous information. It is evident that the paintings are made laboriously, testing how far he can take the medium. An amalgamation of watercolour, oil paint, marker pen and encaustic are used to carefully block off areas, building the surface and composition, contrasting with casual-seeming brushstrokes and open areas of untouched support.

Choreographing the viewer’s interaction with the paintings, through composition and manipulation of architectural space, Concrete-Disco-Systems is unified by a grid which echoes indefinitely through all the work presented. This exhibition contributes to a practice which continuously seeks to evolve through a commitment to abstraction and a rigorous process of re-evaluating histories and systematic methods.