Andrew Spence (artist)
[4][5][6][7] Spence's method of distilling visual phenomena into simple, emblematic images has been compared to Ellsworth Kelly, but his work has differed in its more even balance between abstraction and recognition (often aided by the picture titles), intuitive approach, and varied, expressive paint surfaces.
[35] Artweek's Suzanne Muchnic wrote "Spence attends to the anonymous, manmade beauty frequently overlooked in mundane surroundings";[22] Los Angeles Times critic William Wilson likened the contemplative quality of the textured surfaces to the metaphysical paintings of Giorgio Morandi.
[24][36] As the decade progressed, he turned increasingly to tongue-in-cheek, schematic renderings of common objects and architecture or modernist furniture (e.g., Light, 1987), whose inspirations and eccentric perspectival views (often overhead) only became apparent through the picture titles.
[7][9] Critics such as Eleanor Heartney and Stephen Westfall contrasted the work's minimalist qualities—frontality, figure-ground equilibrium, a sense of planar rigor, proportion and balance—with its divergences from the tradition: idiosyncratic references to manufactured objects, elemental concepts and life experiences and an emphasis on the artist's hand, conveyed through expressive, evidently reworked surfaces.
[5][9][7][41] Heartney described paintings such as Ivy Windows (1988) as "simple without being simplistic," comparing its subtle and intricate relationships between shape, negative space and proportion and irregular rhythmic patterns to Mondrian's Broadway Boogie Woogie.
[20][32] Between 1993 and 1996, in shows at Max Protetch and Morris Healy, Spence continued to create visual complexity within simple configurations, relying on plays with similarity and difference, precise cropping, and repetition to push his images further into the nonfunctional, purely aesthetic realm.
[33][42][43][34] Two-color works, such as Up and Up and Space Saver (both 1993), alternated in terms of figure and ground to complicate readings, while others, like Cover Up (1993) and Goggleplex (1995), rotated and repeated simple forms (zigzags or letters, outlines of goggles) to create rhythmic visual puzzles that, given time, snapped into recognizability for viewers.
[12][44][3] In the 2000s, Spence altered his palette (often using bright saturated colors, in greater quantities), approach to pictorial space, and according to Carol Diehl, his content, shifting toward more fanciful images inspired by emotions rather than the emblematic objects of his past work.
[10][26][45][1] For example, works such as Bob (2002), presented complex spatial and optical effects that shifted under scrutiny, in that case, using horizontal stripes that changed color to suggest an ovoid shape in motion against a rectangle and curve.
[1] Later works, such as Red Pink White 3 (2011) or Untitled Brown/Violet (2018), use spare lines and shapes to suggest layered or shifting two-dimensional planes within or on the periphery of canvasses, and continue Spence's longstanding explorations of picture, object, architecture and design.
