Andrew Kerr: Mitty Mag

Matthew Brown is pleased to present Mitty Mag, a solo exhibition of new paintings, drawings, and sculptures by the Scottish artist Andrew Kerr. This is the artist’s second exhibition with the gallery.

In Mitty Mag, the artist explores the inherent tension between consistency and discovery. Central to Kerr’s practice is the imposition of constraints related to medium and scale, challenging the limits of his compositions and chosen materials.

Kerr’s paintings are rhythmic, intuitive, and can be simultaneously illuminating and elusive. The artist’s decision making and allusions are seemingly animated as we look: repetitive shapes - the head of a screw, upright rectangles, and inverted triangles, for example - emerge from muted colorfields of earthy tones. These linear motifs first appear in Kerr’s drawings, are painted, then dictate new pictorial structures as they spread from painting to painting.

While Kerr has always worked within degrees of abstraction, these recent paintings tend more towards the associative and allusive as his lexicon of symbols reach for a higher definition. Swaths of color become forms themselves as landscapes and scenes of action materialize, some suggest a cliffside or pastures, while others seem to depict the repeated pounding of a hammer into a nail, or the movement of an animal - perhaps a cantering horse or bird in flight - across the picture plane. The works in the exhibition also speak of Kerr’s studied interest in art history and recall Diebenkorn’s aerial-view landscapes, the textures of Prunella Clough, and the limited palettes and draftsman’s sensibility of Georges Braque.

The artist works closely with Glasgow framers Steph Shiels and Marian Campbell. The resulting frames are made with a variety of wood, some salvaged, and are carefully executed to complement the painting within, the carrier and carried becoming one.

Three sculptures are included in the show, a mode of expression Kerr has not used since graduating from art school in Glasgow. The sculptures, which include a cabinet taken from the artist’s home, and a papier-mâché cast of a bale of rope, are intended to blend painting and sculpture, and to enliven sensation.

As the title Mitty Mag is an utterance unmoored from meaning in the English language and  open to influence from the reader’s experiences, Kerr’s artworks occupy a similar position. The artist’s discrete use of logography and abstraction lend themselves to the associations of the viewer, as individual pieces and as a whole. Encouraged by the rhythm and flow of the compositions, the experience of viewing Kerr’s work is one of receiving, internalizing, and at some points, letting go.