Some Stories
Stephen Andrews
paintings
February 28 - March 29, 2025
Paul Petro Contemporary Art is pleased to present Some Stories, an exhibition of portrait paintings by Toronto-based artist Stephen Andrews.
On the evening of February 26, at the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Curators' Circle gathering, we learned about recent acquisitions in a series of curator-led presentations which followed opening remarks by director Stephan Jost and Board of Trustees member Judy Schulich who heads their acquisitions committee.
Adam Welch presented The Artist’s Studio, After Courbet (2021-2024) by Stephen Andrews, purchased in partnership with the National Gallery of Canada. This work will be exhibited at the NGC in 2026 and at the AGO’s opening of the Dani Reiss Modern and Contemporary Gallery extension in Spring 2027.
The exhibition Some Stories is comprised of portrait paintings dating from 2018 to the present. Many were produced between 2018-2020 and others during the three-year production of The Artist's Studio, After Courbet. The portraits accumulated on the walls of the studio and shifted around the studio as the new work expanded in the space, canvas by canvas (there are twelve in all), incorporating most of the portraits into the work along the way.
Making The Artist's Studio, After Courbet inside a studio that is also the subject of the work is a singular experience both to undertake and to experience. We look forward to an interview with Stephen Andrews conducted by Robert Enright for the Spring 2025 edition of Border Crossings that focuses on the evolution of this work.
From Stephen Andrews:
Some Stories
My perennial engagement with the portrait continued in 2018 after I completed a large mosaic commission for the embassy in Paris. That work is a wall size mural of a crowd. Being one small part of something larger is both a simple and a complex idea, one that has been recurring in my work for a long time.
Upon returning home from France, I decided to start putting names to the faces in the crowds once again. Remembering my early works Facsimile and Sonnets it felt important to revisit that process of picture making and couple it with the techniques from my recent mosaic work to produce this new series of portraits.
Pixelation had returned to my daily visual vocabulary. Facial recognition software imaging, social media censorship, Minecraft and the sometimes slow uploading of Instagram content all share the same lo-fi pixelated look. With these new portraits instead of eulogizing my community I thought it would be interesting to celebrate those people around me that I loved or admired, people who were making a difference.
I have been studying physics recently and it has been firing my imagination. Consequently, I have been rereading my working process through a more scientific lens. In these new portraits, Fibonacci numbers and the golden ratio are at play in the determining of sizes of the brushstrokes and their relationships to each other. Concepts of particles and fields dance poetically with the picture’s figures and backgrounds.
This theme began with a series of paintings of starscapes of whose dust we are all made. Those paintings’ tessellated surfaces with their imbricated ‘pixels’ aren’t only particles of reflected light assembled into a night sky, or a likeness, but are also like the grains of sand in an hourglass. Each coloured mark can be a single moment picturing the passage of time, each portrait an encounter, a relationship, a story.
Stephen Andrews
January 7, 2025