Andrew Lyman
Born 1991, Dallas, Texas.
Education
2023 MFA Painting, Boston University.
2014 BA, Sewanee University.
Solo Exhibitions
“No New Messages.” Ferrara Showman Gallery. New Orleans, LA. 2024.
Group Exhibitions
“Delta Triennial.” Arkansas Museum of Fine Art. 2024.
“Into the Thicket.” Morgan Lehman Gallery, New York, NY. 2023.
“No Dead Artists.” Jonathan Ferrara Gallery, New Orleans, LA. 2021.
“Louisiana Contemporary.” Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans, LA. 2021.
“Louisiana Contemporary.” Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans, LA. 2020.
Publications
“New American Paintings” No. 154. 2021.
“Studio Visit Magazine” Vol. 49 + 50. 2021.
“Create Magazine.” Vol. 27. 2021.
“New American Paintings” No. 142. 2019.
Artist Statement:
My paintings use established pictorial ideals associated with class, beauty, and artifice as a framing device for capturing the modern prevalence of anxiety and social alienation. The paintings are composed from film stills that, for their theatrical costume and anachronisms, cannot be mistaken for documents of reality, and the unreality of those images deepens as they are removed from narrative sequence, isolated, and made static in paint. Since the image has been hollowed of its narrative implications, I remain open to material-guided improvisation while painting, which results in new elements being added or removed from the initial composition. I want to recreate the image, not reproduce it. What results are paintings that are rich in detail and suggestion, that oscillate between deep feeling and vacuousness. On the surface, my work appears to be generous toward prolonged looking, but all the while there is an uneasy sense that something is being crucially withheld.
Starting with source imagery originally conceived by someone else creates a sense of separation between the paintings and their realization. A painting made by looking at a photograph is easily distinguishable from a life-painting, but the difference is more felt than seen, and it is felt as a lack of truthfulness. I want to exploit that lack in my paintings, coupling it with cinematic imagery that already forefronts theatrical artifice. Marshall McLuhan said “the medium is the message.” I think that at the heart of the photographic medium is something which alienates the viewer, and that the hidden message beneath almost every video or photograph is one of bereavement. Photography shows us moments where intervention is impossible because the moment shown has already gone. Roland Barthes referred to people in photographs as “specters.” An average person now exists within a vortex of digital imagery, delivering us a vague and endless IV drip of loss. It should be no surprise that there is an epidemic of anxiety.
What then is the hidden message at the heart of painting? Having long since lost its most basic utility to photography, painting has become an anachronism, yet it still feels so vital. I think its underlying message is one of faith, not in the religious sense, but in the humanistic sense. People paint because it is a fundamentally human activity, and it connects us with our past. In my paintings, the hidden precepts underpinning photography and painting wrestle for the final word. Some of my paintings never surpass their photographic origins, but in others the paint medium prevails, and those paintings carry a heartbeat. Usually though, there is no clear hierarchy between the two media, and the back and forth creates tension. In the beginning, I never quite know what the outcome will be. I merely set the parameters, and start painting.