Andrew Mania
395 Valencia Street
January 8th – 29th, 2005
Opening reception, Saturday, January 8th, 6-9pm
Jack Hanley Gallery is pleased to present the first American solo show of British artist Andrew Mania. The exhibition will feature both color and black and white drawings on paper and wood veneer.
Mania is known for his gorgeous portraits featuring young, cool subjects that often stare directly at the viewer. Surrounded by floral decorative elements, or with laser-like beams radiating from their faces, they evoke the mystical qualities of the religious icon. In this way, divorced from any recognizable environment, the figures seem to float in an imagined, glittering disco ball limbo. Mania’s aesthetic of formal binaries in which highly detailed texture is contrasted starkly against simple and deliberate contour lines, allows for a coupling of rough, almost imprecise marks and meticulous, naturalistic modeling.
Mania’s work has been called genuinely idiosyncratic (rather than calculatedly so) and he has won several distinguished awards including the Rome Scholarship, and was featured in the New Contemporaries 2000, an exhibition and competition which features artists which are “the talent of the future.”