Andrew Bick: Systems for Hesitation

About

Hales Gallery is pleased to announce Andrew Bick's third solo show with the gallery. Bick's new exhibition Systems for Hesitation continues to explore notions of uncertainty, revision and adjustment. Using a varied selection of materials including oil paint and watercolour, marker pens and wax on linen or wood, the resulting paintings and drawings serve as ambiguous objects, solid things built out of contradictions. Bick engages with the familiar polarities of painting; clashing elements of gestural passage with hard-edge abstraction or thick, rough and painterly with ordered and smooth. The title OGV [original ghost variety] runs through the new sequence of works which borrow from the series Again made in 2005 and the subsequent ghost paintings of 2006/08. Images of these earlier pieces have been projected on panels the same size to create a revised grid, from which the new paintings are built up in a complex sequence of decisions which Bick describes as a 'stuttering system'. This under-drawing, which is often left exposed, is an important element in the work, providing each painting with a clear structure that makes the process of facture transparent. Past paintings involved a grid marked out in pencil, but within this new body of work, Bick has introduced centrifugal webs of line, sometimes made with coloured marker pen that bleeds though the layers of oil paint, creating off centre or clashing perspectives which draw the viewer into a disconcerting vortex. Bick's work has always been concerned with uncertainty as a subject as well as the humour found in the gap between language and visual object. Early titles such as For Dithering and For the Undecided, accompanied encaustic paintings of physical bulk and directness. The development of titles in his work since 1999, Loop > Disco > Disco Pants, Disco Vest, > Panz, West, > Variant > Trauser, Shirth > Variant [ghost] > Ghost of…> Again > Retrial/Again > OGV [original ghost variety] adds other warped layers to an already unsettled interaction between words and visual ideas.