Contemporary Fine Art Painter
Andrew Gray
Andrew Gray is an international artist producing monumental scale paintings in the genre of magical realism. His paintings are laced with narratives exploring future conditions for human culture. His imagery draws from a synthesis of scientific advances, artificial intelligence, current affairs, popular culture, and world history. As a 21st Century painter Andrew utilises a wide range of stylistic approaches to paint with oil and acrylic media on canvas
In 2014 Andrew completed a PhD researching reflective practices in art and design and currently paints and lectures in Switzerland and Nepal
Paintings
A day will come
210x210cm oil on canvas
Sold
This painting balances a realist panorama of the Zugersee, with Constructivist visual devices in the representation of the super nova of Betelgeuse, and Art Deco geometric patterns and colour schemes in the famous 'Winter Triangle' and the structure of spacetime.
Imagine watching it as it rapidly inflates and casts shadows all around you. I have longed to see it, to actually witness it live, not merely see a recording after the fact. Call me impatient, but the probability of seeing this incredible sight in my lifetime is so remote, that I cling to the fact that, like the travellers in Herman Hesse's 'Journey to the East', I recognise that I have already seen the supernova so many times in my minds-eye. I therefore elect to pre-empt the supernova and represent how it looked the night I saw it above the lake in Zug. The title is derived from a celebrated lecture at the Royal Institute in London, by the young HG Wells in 1902.
"Humanity", he proclaimed, "has come someway, and the distance we have travelled gives us some insight of the way we have to go. It is possible to believe that all the past is but the beginning of a beginning, and that all that is and has been, is but the twilight of the dawn. It is possible to believe that all that the human mind has accomplished is but the dream before the awakening. Out of our lineage, minds will spring that will reach back to us in our littleness, to know us better than we know ourselves. A day will come, one day in the unending succession of days, when beings, beings who are now latent in our thoughts and hidden in our loins, shall stand upon this earth as one stands up on a footstool, and shall laugh and reach out their hands amidst the stars." As an avid Sci-fi writer HG Wells recognised that we are not the culmination of the human story. When he writes, "Out of our lineage, minds will spring that will reach back to us in our littleness, to know us better than we know ourselves", that is already artificial intelligence for me. In this painting I contemplate what the world and our relationship to technology might be, when the light from the supernova and the destruction of Betelgeuse finally arrives at our pale blue dot.
In this second 200x120cm oil on canvas - Sold
When all the past is but a thought, and all the future is but a thought, how we are in this second is all we ever truly have. The moon is seen here setting over the beautiful central Swiss city of Luzern. The reflections on lake are phenomenologically resonant as in Gaston Bachelard’s ‘Water and Dreams’. They appear fixed and yet are entirely transient. Such is human experience. Dominant philosophies of the twentieth century eschewed embodied experience in place of erroneous notions that scientific knowledge is absolute.
Moon base Artemis 300x160cm oil on canvas - Available
'Moon Base Alpha' explores the fulcrum of magical realist and surrealist approaches to painting. The floor plan for the temple of Artemis, greatest of the wonders of the ancient world, looks back at Bill Ander's 'Earthrise' image taken from the 1968 Apollo 8 mission. Apollo and Artemis enter the scene from the wings a nod to both past and future missions. The Poncairé circle limit, the structure of which infers the holographical principle, frames the painting. Artemis' arrow cascades inwardly to the shadow of Kohl Fury, a Cambridge Post-Doc whose work on Octonions may reveal a mathematical structure capable of predicting subatomic interactions. Her shadow is posed on a ladder, a reference to Italo Calvino's Cosmo Comics. Human invention is celebrated. A symbol of universality grows in the Feigenbaum constant and its mirror, the Mandelbrot Set. In the central arena, an ode to Frank Moore (b. 1953) the races of Star Craft 2 standoff whilst the fourth component, the model constructed by AlphaFold 2 of a cylindrical mitochondrial protein poses and allegory for the Al developer Google's DeepMind's mission 'to solve intelligence and use it to make the world a better place'. All look back at the earth in reflection, to all that transpires on our pale blue dot, between the base and the sublime.
Dr Andrew Gray +41 (0)796414617
The Conference of Crossed Destinies
Oil and Acrylic on canvas 200x120cm - Sold
The Astronomer Royal, Lord Martin Rees, once described science as the structure of a building. Particle physics is in the basement as it is truly fundamental, ascending through the more complex structures of chemistry, biology and the life sciences, until we finally reach economists who aspire to claim the penthouse. Italo Calvino’s ‘The Castle of Crossed Destinies’ (1973), deals with semantics, meaning and interpretation. It depicts a group of travelers who inexplicably lose their ability to speak after passing through a magical forest on horseback. After arriving at a castle, they join their aristocratic hosts around a long table and attempt to regale the conditions under which they came there pictorially using Tarot cards. The narrator’s loose interpretations are indicative of how easily meanings can be misconstrued. This beautiful book was used by Vlatko Vedral (2010) as a metaphor with which to structure his scientific discourse- ‘Decoding Reality; The Universe as Quantum Information’. He envisaged a scenario in which each of the participants around the table represent a knowledge field and that the research conducted in each field uncovers just one aspect of what we understand as reality. His proposal that one thing to connects them all, and that is that information is physical, is compelling. That ‘the conference of crossed destinies’ (2021) I place a multicultural cast of characters whose activities or research has fascinated me
Yet across the gulf of space
Oil and Acrylic on canvas 300x100cm - Sold
Nasa's Curiosity rover landed on Mars on August 6, 2012. The incredible engineering and technical vision is enabling the search for the next genesis, the theme explored in this painting. Coatlicue, an Aztec statue depicting the mother of the sun, is also the name given to the massive second generation star that went supernova 8.5 billion years ago. This supernova seeded the interstellar medium with the heavy elements that compose our solar system and any life in it. Hanging in the air like the classic space invaders game of the 1980's, are the biomorphs developed by the esteemed evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. Humanity is still taking baby steps in terms of discovering life elsewhere in the universe, and our fragility as a species is echoed in the vulnerability of the infant. The harshness of the Martian environment stands in contrast to the rich diversity of habitats found on Earth
Born in a Water Moon
In 2017, Alphago, an artificial intelligence algorithm created by Google DeepMind, beat the 18 time World Champion Go player Lee Seedol in a televised challenge match 4-1. The match was seen as a coming of age for AI
Oil and Acrylic on canvas 300x200cm - Sold
Look again at that pale blue dot (in the balance)
Oil and Acrylic on canvas 300x190cm - Sold
In the 1970's Carl Sargen's famous words were intended to inspire a generation to care for planet earth. Whilst this did not materialise the early Twentieth Century environmental movement is 'looking again'. We must explore what potential new technologies could have in helping solve environmental crisis, whilst simultaneously being cautious of the dangers it may pose. Here I am in conversation with my AI Avatar (after Bina48), whilst Libra from the Kit-Al-Buhan symbolises the need for balance
Orders of magnitude
Oil and Arcylic on canvas, 180x 130cm Private collection
In 2019 the first photograph of the super-massive blackhole M87 was released. It followed the discovery of the Higgs Boson at CERN in 2012. Here both are composed in relation to the human scale, which is numerically poised midway between the very largest and smallest structures in the universe. This painting explores my genuine fascination that life, to quote Sir Martin Rees, "assumes its greatest complexity on this intermediate scale", and that nothing more complex as a human brain has yet been discovered.
Rosetta Stone
Oil and acyrlic on canvas 160x160cm - Sold
The arrival of ESA's Rosetta satellite (so named after the Rosetta stone used to decode Egyptian hieroglyphics) at comet
67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko (67P) in 2014, was the extraordinary culmination of a 20 year mission. The discovery of Glycine in the coma fuelled debates about the origins of complex life in our solar system.
Truing the wheel
The philosophical writing of the American Pragmatists has been described as the first empirically responsible philosophy, which drew upon the best cognitive science of the age. The philosopher John J. McDermott once described Pragmatism as 'truing the wheel' reflecting our need to periodically reassess our experiences in the flux of life.
Oil and acyrlic on canvas 270x80cm - Sold
Past work
