Andrew Spence (born 1947) is an American artist known for abstract paintings that combine a minimalist vocabulary with playful references to the observed world.Hirsch, Faye. "The World in Brief," Art in America, September 2006, p. 150–3.Mahoney, Robert. "Andrew Spence at Edward Thorp," Art In America, January 2002, p. 112–3.Smith, Roberta. "Andy Spence: '20 Years of Painting,'” The New York Times, November 15, 1996, p. C21. Retrieved May 24, 2021. In the 1970s and 1980s, he gained recognition as one of a number of younger artists who were re-examining geometric modernism through a contemporary lens that invited humor and reference to everyday objects and life experience into the tradition.Wilson, William. "Art Walk, A Critical Guide to the Galleries, La Cienega Area", Los Angeles Times, August 26, 1974, Part IV, p. 14.Westfall, Stephen. "Andrew Spence at Barbara Toll," Art in America, January 1984, p. 124.Perl, Jed. "The Old is New," Vogue, August 1989, p. 214–8.Stapen, Nancy. "Neo-Geo Spence paints lasting impression," The Boston Herald, April 4, 1989, p. 34. Spence's method of distilling visual phenomena into simple, emblematic images has been compared to Ellsworth Kelly, but his work has differed in its more even balance between abstraction and recognition (often aided by the picture titles), intuitive approach, and varied, expressive paint surfaces.Naves, Mario. "Andrew Spence One-Ups Ellsworth Kelly," Observer, April 30, 2001. Retrieved May 18, 2021.Heartney, Eleanor. "Andrew Spence at Barbara Toll", Art in America, February 1989, p. 162.Diehl, Carol. "Andrew Spence at Ed Thorp," Art In America, July 2003, p. 89–90.Katz, Vincent. "Andy Spence at Morris Healy," Art In America, May 1996. Art in America critic Ken Johnson wrote that his work maintains "an ironic tension between lofty purism of modernist geometry and earth-bound ordinariness of the vernacular sources."Johnson, Ken. "Andrew Spence at Max Protetch," Art In America, December 1993, p. 97. In later paintings, Spence has increasingly obscured the original inspirations of his abstractions, in both form and titling.Storr, Robert. Doing What Comes Naturally: Seven Painters in Their Prime, New York: Milton Resnick and Pat Pasloff Foundation, 2019, p. 3–12. His work belongs to the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art,The Metropolitan Museum of Art. China, 1991, Andrew Spence, Art, Collection. Retrieved May 15, 2021. Museum of Modern Art,Museum of Modern Art. Andrew Spence, Artists. Retrieved May 15, 2021. and Whitney Museum of American Art,Whitney Museum of American Art. Andrew Spence, Artists. Retrieved May 15, 2021. among others. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and National Endowment for the Arts.John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Andrew Spence, Fellows. Retrieved May 15, 2021.American Academy of Arts and Letters. Hassam, Speicher, Betts, and Symons Purchase Fund, Awards. Retrieved May 15, 2021.
Life and career Spence was born in 1947 in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania and raised in Philadelphia.La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art. Four Californians: Christopher Georgesco, Patsy Krebs, Andrew Spence, Robert Therrien, La Jolla, CA: La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, 1977. Retrieved May 15, 2021. He attended the University of Oklahoma, then transferred to the Tyler School of Art, studying in Rome and Philadelphia before graduating with a BFA in 1969. In 1971, he completed an MFA at University of California at Santa Barbara and moved to Los Angeles.Harkavy, Donna. Insights: Ann Messner & Andrew Spence, Worcester, MA: Worcester Art Museum, 1991. He continued to make art and worked for several years as an art handler and crater, which reinforced an interest in the built world and afforded him direct access to the work of minimalist painter John McLaughlin and designer Charles Eames, both early influences.Bartman, William S. Andrew Spence, New York: A.R.T. Press/Art Resources Transfer, 1992. Retrieved May 21, 2021. In his first professional decade, Spence was selected for the 1975 Whitney Biennial and group exhibitions at MoMA PS1, the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art (LAICA), and Indianapolis Museum of Art.Muchnic, Suzanne. "Four Abstractionists – Krebs, Spence, Therrien, Georgesco," Artweek, May 26, 1977. His first solo exhibitions were at the Nicholas Wilder Gallery in Los Angeles in 1974 and 1976.Wilson, William. "Art Walk, A Critical Guide to the Galleries, La Cienega Area", Los Angeles Times, April 9, 1976, p. E12.
In 1977, Spence moved to New York City, where he exhibited in seven solo shows at the Barbara Toll Gallery between 1982 and 1990.Howe, Katherine. "Andy Spence at Barbara Toll Fine Arts," Images & Issues, Summer 1982. He has had subsequent exhibitions at the Worcester Art Museum (1991) and Max Protetch Gallery (1992, 1993), Edward Thorp Gallery (2001, 2002, 2006) and 57W57 Arts (2016) in New York, among others.Magiera, Frank. "Worcester Art Museum; Insights on contemporary art," Telegram & Gazette, April 8, 1991.Naves, Mario. "An Artist’s Formidable Gaze, Withering and a Touch Arrogant," Observer, November 25, 2002. Retrieved May 18, 2021. He also appeared in the 1989 Whitney Biennial, the 40th Biennial at the Corcoran Gallery of Art (1987), and group exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum.Grimes, Nancy. "Whitney Biennial," Tema Celeste, September 1988, p. 66–8.Brenson, Michael. "True Believers Who Keep the Flame of Painting," The New York Times, June 7, 1987, Sect. 2, p. 37.Thorson, Alice. "Two Ways of Approaching Abstraction," The Washington Times, May 14, 1987.Smith, Roberta. "'Generations of Geometry,' an Abstract Show," The New York Times, July 17, 1987. p. C32. Retrieved May 18, 2021.
Spence lives and works in New York with his wife, Sique Spence.
Work and reception Spence's work has been related to minimalist predecessors such as Constructivism, Malevich and McLaughlin, as well as to contemporary movements such as Neo-Geo. However, critics suggest that it evades simple categorization, developing out of an intuitive "internal momentum," rather than theoretical frameworks or ideological trends.LeClair, Charles. "Minimalism and Postmodern Attitudes," Color In Contemporary Painting, New York: Watson Guptil, 1991, p. 72–3. Retrieved May 24, 2021. Eleanor Heartney wrote that his "quietly effective paintings steer a course between the austere reductiveness of an Ellsworth Kelly and the self-proclaimed negation of a Peter Halley." Writers point to Spence's synthesis of humanizing aspects outside the formalist tradition as defining characteristics: a quirky sense of humor and associativeness; the use of personal imagery and observed experience;Myers, Terry, "Andrew Spence," Arts Magazine, September 1990. a populist enthusiasm for vernacular design and the breakdown of high-low distinctions;Pardee, Hearne. "Andrew Spence," ARTnews, Summer 1992, p. 130–1.Harris, Jane. "Andy Spence," Review, November 1996, p. 24. and densely worked surfaces that reveal the artistic process and impart an emotional quality to otherwise cool work.
Spence's art often occupies an ambiguous position between abstract and representational, sophisticated and ordinary, and meditative and deadpan that is echoed by shifting figure-ground relationships.App, Timothy. "Six Approaches to Formalist Abstraction," Artweek, March 5, 1977, p. 7. His paintings arise out of a rigorous drawing process, which results in schematic images refined to edge of recognition and a core of essence.Armstrong, Richard "Andrew Spence", Artforum, December 1983, p. 83. Retrieved May 18, 2021. This formal concision extends to his use of color, which is non-associative, and while sometimes bold, often limited to two or three colors, one of which is nearly always white. Carol Diehl wrote that the work's "innate drollness" is offset by Spence's acute attention to surface. While his paintings appear flat and hard-edged in reproduction, reviewers frequently note their physicality and dense, varied textures.Hornung, David. "Andrew Spence", ARTnews, January 1989, p. 134. Spence builds them in waxy layers applied with a paint-laden palette knife, creating shapes with nearly engraved edges that he sands and polishes to an opaque sheen.
Early work: 1970s Spence first received attention in the mid-1970s for abstract work compared to modernists from Malevich to Barnett Newman in terms of its reductive visual grammar, geometric integrity and stillness.Rush, David. "Andrew Spence: Avoiding Gravity Plays," Artweek, September 25, 1976, p. 7.Kienholz, Lyn. L.A. Rising: SoCal Artists Before 1980, Los Angeles: The California/International Art Foundation, 2010, p. 428. Retrieved May 18, 2021. The paintings referenced the texture and color of Los Angeles's built environment (e.g., prefabricated homes and trailers, aluminum siding or painted walls), incorporating molded-acrylic structural elements, abutting panels, impersonal industrial hues, and thickly applied enamel that sometimes formed vertical spines dividing color areas. Critics compared them to "abstract facades ripped out of context" situated between paintings and painted objects,Auping, Michael. Abstract Painting: A Selected Exhibition, Long Beach, CA: Long Beach City College, 1977. and physical coarseness and compositional elegance. Artweek'''s Suzanne Muchnic wrote "Spence attends to the anonymous, manmade beauty frequently overlooked in mundane surroundings"; Los Angeles Times critic William Wilson likened the contemplative quality of the textured surfaces to the metaphysical paintings of Giorgio Morandi.
Mature work In the 1980s, Spence moved away from a rectilinear vocabulary, incorporating arcs, spirals and triangles and biomorphic shapes into his work. His images initially consisted of singular, iconic images in limited colors that were embedded in heavily textured surfaces and read like graphic language symbols or fragments of advertising logos. As the decade progressed, he turned increasingly to tongue-in-cheek, schematic renderings of common objects and architecture or modernist furniture (e.g., Light, 1987), whose inspirations and eccentric perspectival views (often overhead) only became apparent through the picture titles. For example, Swivel Chairs (1988) drew on the well-known Eames armchair design, while Blue Canoe (1988) presented a field of horizontal stripes, two of which were blue and altered to mimic half-canoe shapes.
Critics such as Eleanor Heartney and Stephen Westfall contrasted the work's minimalist qualities—frontality, figure-ground equilibrium, a sense of planar rigor, proportion and balance—with its divergences from the tradition: idiosyncratic references to manufactured objects, elemental concepts and life experiences and an emphasis on the artist's hand, conveyed through expressive, evidently reworked surfaces.Lurie, David. Review, Arts Magazine, January 1986. Heartney described paintings such as Ivy Windows (1988) as "simple without being simplistic," comparing its subtle and intricate relationships between shape, negative space and proportion and irregular rhythmic patterns to Mondrian's Broadway Boogie Woogie.