The Stade IV Painting

Andrew Hardy is a painter who grew up in Derbyshire and now lives and works in London. Following a long career as a creative director in the retail design industry, working for many of Europe’s leading retailers and retail branding agencies, he now devotes himself full-time to painting. In 2019 he graduated from Camberwell College of Arts, part of the University of the Arts, London, with a BA (Hons) Painting (1st Class). During 2019-20 he had a studio at Turps Art School, London which provides an alternative educational environment at master's degree level for postgraduate painters. His association with Turps Art School continues. Hardy paints in an abstract language, using abstraction to work through broader questions of materiality, repetition, gesture and chance. When painting, he is occupied with the physicality of the process, connecting with his materials, tools and surfaces in different ways. The process is a form of performance. It is about the act of painting and he sees each finished work as a record of the journey he has been on with it, a record of an experiment or of a line of enquiry. The question of content is not in the foreground. The emphasis is on 'painting as object' rather than any recognisable image or narrative. Most of his work refers only to itself, to nothing but its own making. The emphasis is on form, materials and processes. The paintings are their own subject matter. The artist says of his paintings, "I don’t feel any urge to depict things or tell stories or make statements. I do not feel a need to paint scenes, situations or likenesses of people, or to be in any way referential whether literal, stylised, imagined or metaphorical. I seek to make work that is able to draw viewers in, to question and enjoy its materiality and facture. The work does not have any meaning although I do want it to be meaningful… which is a different thing.”