Edel Assanti is pleased to present The Gold Standard, Andrew Sutherland's first solo exhibition in the UK. Andrew Sutherland's work excavates all manner of compositional form. Mining an endless variety of sources, he discards, distorts, presents and manipulates, offering a combination of form and latent content. His continuously shifting plethora of found sensory stimuli initiates an inquiry into where our interest in and understanding of form resides, and from where it originates.

Sutherland's trash bag paintings are layered acrylic paint casts of splayed industrial rubbish bags. Materialising through a pseudo-sculptural process, the works present themselves as monochromes, evading classification in their textured, seemingly symmetrical patterns. The final works are selected from a broad range of otherwise unsuitable trash bags for their sufficient compositional intrigue, effectively simulating the desired Rorschach effect. The presentation creates an immediate dissonance with the jeeringly lowbrow source material, calling into question the sincerity of form as an indicator of content.

The linear 'tape paintings' are created using the same cast-like procedure as the trash bag works, only in these instances, the compositions are drawn from the packing tape holding cardboard boxes together. The same stringent process of selection is applied, resulting in formal arrangements that resemble the grid mechanism that emerged with Modernism, now a pervasive device in contemporary art - here however, the forms are 'ready-made', suggesting a standardisation of form, relinquishing conviction in its novelty.

Sutherland's Hourglass series documents the symmetrical patterning on the front and back of black widow spiders. This series hints at Sutherland's personal connection with and interest in the landscape and iconography of the American West. These works simultaneously extends the formal inquiry initiated in the other bodies of work into a photographic realm, serving to blur of the boundary between uniqueness and originality, the haphazard and the seemingly intentional. 

Sutherland graduated from Fort Lewis College, Durango, in 2000. Recent solo / two-person exhibitions include The Armory Show, NY, with Edel Assanti 2014, Extreme Terrain at Bill Brady, Kansas City (with Peter Sutherland), 2013, AMHR at ATM Gallery, NY, 2009. Recent group exhibitions include New Acquisitions at the Nerman Museum, Kansas City, Interrupt (Michael Kohn, LA, 2012), Riff Raff (Still House Group in Miami, 2011), Homeboy (Still House Group, NY). Sutherland lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

*image (left)
Andrew Sutherland
Gold Rush, 2014,
Acrylic on canvas, 96 x 70 in.
courtesy of the artist and Edel Assanti