Andrew Browne

He works primarily in painting, but also in photography and graphic mediums including drawing, photogravure, intaglio and lithography. As well he has recently re-engaged with sculpture.

Since the 1980’s he has developed imagery from both the natural and the man-made environment - through a formal collision of subject - with a specific interest in investigating the phenomena of illumination, the poetics of the nocturne and the everyday, and a 'landscape alienated from the picturesque' . Evoking an uncanny and at times strange and surreal mood, his work highlights an artificiality and subjectivity filtered through his relationship with observed phenomena, which he will then often isolate and abstract. As such his practice emerges from a complex series of relationships that encompass this direct observation, as well as imaginative play and free association, a debt to the photographic, the historical and contemporary parameters of painting, and art history more generally - variously suggesting ongoing issues dealing with technological and social change and our at times ambiguous, bewildering and contradictory place within an evolving environment.

His works have been variously described as romantic, cool, eerie and spectral in quality, uncanny, iconic and emblematic, odd and engaging. They have been identified as essentially psychic landscapes of apprehension, giving the impression of realism yet using, at times, the language of abstraction. He is primarily concerned with a direct psychological impact in particular images and relationships, both in the paintings and graphics — where form has become more stylized and suggestive, anthropomorphic and surreal — and in his photography where what might often appear as a quasi-documentary style disguises careful manipulation, creating fictions that evoke 'gothic romance' and 'absurdist pathos'.