Andrew Hollis

Andrew Hollis

Born South Africa, 1974

Since graduation in 1996 I have been making art, primarily in the form of paintings, taking part in 1997 in No 4, a human rights exhibition held at the Old Fort in Johannesburg. In 1999 I had my first solo show of paintings, held at the AVA in Cape Town. In 2000 I left South Africa.

I have since travelled extensively, mostly in Europe and Latin America, producing artwork: paintings, sculpture, photography, and more recently video, and have shown work in London, Hamburg, Israel, the Czech Republic and Guatemala.

My work deals with concepts of identity and anonymity, with the dialogue between the internal looking out and the blind external.

Over the last couple of years I have become increasingly interested in developing processes and systems of painting with which to remove the individual from the figurative, in order to return to the human, to arrive at a point beyond relating a story or capturing a moment.

Ive wanted to lose the moment, empty the painting of the specific in order to describe the universal, to create a testimonial to a shared experience.

I am interested in the way the personal can be concealed or negated, being superficially deceitful in order to be truthful, giving information through the removal of information.

I wish to portray neither the subjects visual reality, nor the idea of the subject, but rather a concept made visible through the distortion of the subject.

I wish the subject of the painting to no longer reside in the painting but to reside in the loss of the identity of the subject.

What Ive attempted is the alignment of the practice of figurative painting with a more historical, natural perspective.

1994 1996 National Diploma 3D Design, Technikon Witwatersrand (University of Johannesburg), JHB, RSA

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