Introduction -
Andrew Gritscher - We Give and Expect in Return

Andrew Gritscher is an Austrian/Australian artist acutely attuned to Contemporary culture, his ideas and musings on people and the world we live in are complex, informed and intriguing. Due to his innovative and inventive approach to his artistic practice it is not always possible to immediately comprehend what is being said or presented, there is a coded language in his work that is explicable only after a certain amount of the pieces of the puzzle are located. Gritscher’s intrinsically narrative works reward the patient mind and eye yet they are also so bold and overflowing with visual information that they arrest the viewer and invoke a sense of visual excitement on coming in contact with his multi-layered constructions.

After months of dedicated time in his atelier in Melbourne throughout 2017 Gristcher created an exceptional body of new work for an exhibition that was held at Tête gallery in Berlin last October. For this The Way Out of The Way Out series a total of six works were made using the artist’s main medium at that time, fabric – fabric stitched, unstitched, cut, patched, rearranged, added to, subtracted from – completely transformed into essentially three dimensional works that drape from the wall. At times works in this series are literally buttoned together to make a larger whole work comprised of parts, while his selection of materials appears limitless his work is cohesive and every visual clue intentional even if at times the edges are frayed, the materials look indiscriminately marked, placed or are hanging by a thread.

In Gritscher’s latest exhibition We Give and Expect in Return to be held in Melbourne from late May to mid-June, a combination of three of the key fabric works shown in Berlin as well as a new Porcelain Tile piece made in the first half of this year will be exhibited in combination. This presentation offers audiences based in Australia the chance to see the extraordinary works exhibited in Europe last year as well as see how Gritscher continues to experiment with the materials he selects to express his ideas through his complex large scale artworks.

Andrew Gritscher first exhibited with Jacob Hoerner Galleries in 2015 in the exhibition Extra-Ordinary Paintings Based on Actual Events, then in 2016 with a second solo exhibition titled Altered Beast, then in Berlin in October 2017 with the exhibition The Way Out of the Way Out. We Give and Expect in Return is now his fourth solo exhibition with Jacob Hoerner Galleries. Jacob Hoerner Galleries will also be exhibiting new work by Gritscher at Sydney Contemporary in September 2018 alongside Andrew Sibley and Gillian Warden.

Gritscher is in the Australian Government’s Artbank Collection, the collection of the State Library of Victoria and in numerous private collections in Australia and Europe.