Introduction -
Andrew Gritscher - Altered Beast

‘Two themes that I keep coming back to whilst making these works are – Thinking which sits outside of logic, a different way to thinking, an intuition, simply an understanding of things and secondly our true nature.  Throughout making some of these pictures I have been thinking about Zen Koans. One of the pictures directly references a Koan, another (the largest work) is my own Koan. So below, for an artist’s statement, is an old Koan – it relates for me very well to a number of the pictures and how I think as well as the title of the show.

“The Ch’uan Teng Lu records an encounter between Tao-hsin and the sage Fa-yung, who lived in a lonely temple on Mount Niu-t’ou, and was so holy that birds used to bring him offerings as flowers. As the two men were talking, a wild animal roared close by, and Tao-hsin jumped. Fa-yung commented, “I see it is still with you!” -referring, of course, to the instinctive “passion” of fright. Shortly afterwards, while he was for a moment unobserved, Tao-hsin wrote the Chinese character for “Buddha” on the rock where Fa-yung was accustomed to sit. When Fa-yung returned to sit down again, he saw the sacred Name and hesitated to sit. “I see,” said Tao-hsin, “it is still with you!” At this remark Fa-yung was fully awakened… and the birds never brought any more flowers.”‘ – Andrew Gritscher | October 2016