Arbeit Macht Frei Painting

Andrew Cole is a British artist currently living and working in Shanghai, who has previously lived in Oman, Thailand and South Africa. His work is generally abstract in nature, drawing on Minimalism, Expressionism and Abstract Expressionism, as well as the primacy of the idea for the conceptual artists. Although he is primarily a painter, he also works in digital media and installation. While his overarching theme is humanity, he tends to concentrate on humans and human action as an absence rather than a presence, through traces left behind on ruined and damaged forms, rather than the human form itself, which, if it is used, tends to be abstracted, distorted or disrupted in some way. He explores the impact and processes of human thinking, either as an abstract conceptual space or through the lens of history, politics, philosophy, literature and so on as represented by marks on textured surfaces designed to evoke landscape, either natural or constructed, virtual or actual. His work has been shown and collected in Europe, Africa and Asia.