Exhibition Statement
In his exhibition, The Nite in the Nite and the Nite in the Daytime, Hladky presents a series of 3-dimensional paintings and paint-sculptures made with oil paint and bamboo sticks. The artworks overflow their frames, reaching out into the gallery space, growing onto the walls and towards the viewer. Strange and intricate structures made out of broken bamboo sticks build outwards as if dredged up from the paint surface. These uneven structures disrupt the painted image, opening fissures within it and acting as a lure for other, more sinister, associations. Viewers are encouraged to take in many different viewpoints, piecing together their own meaning, narratives and connective threads between the pieces.
The titles of the exhibition and of the artworks are quotes from the book Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban. This is a post-apocalyptic novel set in a new Iron Age, humanity still recovering from nuclear catastrophe. People dredge machinery and bits of metal from the ground, every object they recover a cryptic message from the past. The book is written in a corrupted dialect with words broken apart or melded together and carrying new associations. Meaning has to be pieced together slowly, and with it, a strange and unsettling view of the world.
Artist Bio
Andrew Hladky is an artist who grew up in England and now lives and works in Philadelphia. He received a BA in Fine Art from the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne in 2001 and an MA in Painting from Wimbledon School of Art, London, in 2003. He has since exhibited widely, in London, around the UK, and internationally. This will be his third solo exhibition since moving to the US. His first solo exhibition, Its Some Kynd Of Thing It Aint Us But Yet Its In Us, was from Aug-Sep 2016 at Artspace in Raleigh, NC. His second solo exhibition, Our Woal Life Is A Idear We Dint Think Of Nor We Dont Know What It Is. What A Way To Live, was from Oct-Dec 2016 at Arlington Arts Center, VA.
In 2010 Hladky was awarded the London Art Award at the London Festival Fringe, and in 2015 he was shortlisted for the East London Painting Prize. Since moving to the US Hladky has been awarded many fellowships and residencies, including at Yaddo, a Pollock-Krasner Fellowship and a VSC Fellowship at Vermont Studio Center, a Ruth Katzman Scholarship at The Art Student League of New York Vyt Residency, and fellowships at Jentel, VCCA, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, Willapa Bay, Artspace NC, Crosshatch and Teton Artlab.
As part of the collaborative group, On Innards, with artists Mindy Lee, Amanda Couch and Richard Nash, Hladky published a 200-page artist’s book in September 2015, available through bookRoom Press, Farnham, UK, ISBN: 978-0-9576828-5-6. It has since been acquired by the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Joan Flasch Artists’ Books Collection, the Metropolitan Museum New York, and the MoMA Library and Archives, amongst other collections. With On Innards, Hladky has also presented work at an International Body Horror Conference in Athens, held a major exhibition at Imperial College, London, and held an interdisciplinary daylong seminar that brought together researchers and practitioners from the fields of gastroenterology, virology, cultural theory, art history, yoga, performance and fine art, and the medical humanities, to explore different perspectives on digestion, innards and the interior body.
