Andrew Wild is an artist living and working in Sowerby Bridge, West Yorkshire.

Wild’s works are primarily large-scale, subtle, meditative paintings that focus on the tactile, aesthetic properties of their various materials, whether that’s the raw weave of the canvas; the viscous quality of the heavily applied oil paint; or the granular forms of piled dust, pigments and studio detritus.

Oscillating between material abstraction and figurative representation, delicately layered surfaces accumulate complex patina that suggest the damp walls, weathered surfaces and material ephemera of the Calder Valley - whilst always declaring their intrinsic materiality.

Ruminations on grand Modernist ideas of spiritual ascension, of transcendence, through Art, are smashed against signifiers of a distinctly Working-Class existence, such as net curtains and fragments of adhesive tapes, posing questions regarding the essential function of Painting within such a socio-political, economic and cultural context.

Like the physical, tangible materials of the paintings, layers of cross-cultural references, from esoteric works of Christian Mysticism to Free Jazz, Zen Buddhism to Salford Post-punk group The Fall, are used to form a complex, multifaceted, and often discordant, syntax of yearning exploration.