Rendered with extreme detail and an ineffable sense of both reality and the fantastical, Harper’s works are arenas for discovery and camouflage. The visual lexicon – flashes of light from unidentified sources, the enumerable vegetal forms entwined with hints of human anatomy, wan ivory vertebrae – marks the exuberance of growth as well as its inevitable companion, death and decay. It is a world known and imagined, familiar yet suspenseful, for it is the very progress of life that flourishes before our eyes.
Andy Harper was born in the United Kingdom in 1971. He received his BA from Brighton Polytechnic in 1993, a Master’s Degree in Fine Art from the Royal College of Art in 1995, and an additional Master’s Degree in Visual Culture from Middlesex University in 1999.
Harper lives in West Cornwall and has been invovled in many artist-run activities, including NotCut studios in London, Braziers International Artists’ Workshop in Oxfordshire and Assembly in St Just. He has taught in many institutions nationally and internationally, and held posts at Central St. Martins, The City Lit and is currently a Senior Lecturer on the MFA Fine programme at Goldsmiths in London.
Harper has exhibited extensively in the United states, South Korea, Switzerland, Germany, Belgium, Mexico, Sweden, Italy, France and the UK.