Selected Reviews
Janet Metzger, Andrew Young, Edward Scott, Jr.
Gallery News, May, 1989
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The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Gallery 2
The paintings/constructions of Andrew Young are sensitive, but seductive images steeped in Western symbolism. However in his embracement of the past, his work has a liberating quality. The poetic trace of the artist’s search to come to terms with his particular past socially and within an art historical context emerges from the work. Memory, rather, than a reliance upon art history, is used to probe the possibility of discovering new forms of expression. The surfaces of the paintings are richly layered. Areas of penetrating color broken by stripes or small rectangular forms divide the space into harmonic patterns. These patterns take on the status of a symbolic syntax when paired with a recognizable image such as a human head or a cross. These images are buried, rescued and buried again which builds up the surface and “distances” or obscures the objects. Their presence then becomes a part of the physical history of the canvas itself. The objects radiate from the surface as opposed to simply sitting on top the surface for the immediate digestion of the viewer. |
What was it These Early Men Dreamed of?, 1988
Egg tempera, oil paint and clay on wood panel, 48 x 38 in. |
Illumination, 1988
Egg tempera, glass, carbon paper, and raw pigment on wood panel, 22 x 18 in. |
Young describes his work as an exploration of the past “for the possibility of new expression. I experiment with old forms in search of definition, a way or organizing my own experience, reinventing all the time ourselves and our becoming.”
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