Bio: 

Andy Wellington is a painter working primarily in oil, acrylic, and ink. He received his MFA in fine arts from Pratt institute in 2014. He lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Statement: 

Much of my past work represented a style of “cyborg abstraction,” exploring the intersection of technology and biology in a non-representational format. More recently, my work has taken a figurative turn, exploring the psychology of powerlessness and rage through depictions of an infantile scream. These paintings depict absurd, cartoonish characters whose geometric features mimic the structures of canvas and wood on which they are painted; they seem to emerge organically from the spatial and material matrix which sustains them. Their scream is an elemental expression: it might signal rage, fear, or sheer hunger. In an adult, it might belie the impotence behind blustering displays of dominance, or the inarticulate void behind the barked command.

The paintings I have contributed to the Zeitgeist exhibition depict cartoonishly stylized portraits with square features: literal blockheads. In musty beatnik slang, a “square” is someone who lacks individuality, who submits too readily to the constraints of social convention. But squareness has an ethical dimension: to be square is to embrace principled limits on personal freedom, in order to make collective life possible. Wearing a mask and maintaining social distancing are necessary measures, and are also deeply square.

The overlapping crises of 2020 have forced many of us (myself included) to rediscover the virtues and privations of squareness, confronting us with a humbling awareness of the larger social systems and historical patterns in which our individual lives are embedded. In an individualistic culture, this awareness has arrived as a painful shock, provoking a furious backlash that has appeared variously comical, grotesque, and menacing.

This backlash has brought us one of the archetypal faces of 2020: the clownish mask of thwarted entitlement. It is in the petulance of the ubiquitous “Karen” who refuses to submit to the indignity of wearing a mask, or—more lethally—the rage and terror of the cop who refuses to accept limits to his authority and power. In my recent work, I have tried to literalize the notion of ambivalent squareness: to distill the comic rage at encountering limitations to one’s powers and freedoms, at finding one’s ego suddenly diminished.