• Andrew Bryant is an artist and mentor based in Cornwall, UK. A former editor for a-n and Tate Online, he holds an MFA from Goldsmiths College and was shortlisted for the Contemporary British Painting Prize in 2022 and 2026. Informed by psychoanalysis, posthumanism and climate change, his work explores how surface and materiality shape perception, exposing and obscuring deeper structures.

    Andrew’s paintings explore how surface, texture and materiality shape—and sometimes distort—our perception of the world. He is interested in how appearances can expose and obscure the deeper structures and dependencies through which objects, images and subjects are formed. Painting slows the image, testing what its surface allows us to see and what it leaves concealed.

    Working from printed matter, the internet, photography and AI-generated hybrid imagery, Andrew makes paintings and occasional drawings of isolated objects that appear fragile, lacking or incomplete. They seem caught between function and failure, unable to act independently or suspended in a state of unresolved dependency. Their stillness allows uncertainty to gather around their identity, scale and purpose. Through them, he addresses contemporary fantasies of autonomy and self-sufficiency, while pointing towards the psychic, social, material and ecological conditions those fantasies seek to deny.

    For Andrew, painting is a form of translation: a slow, attentive process through which an existing image is remade. He may spend months, sometimes years, on a single work, giving close attention to surface nuance while suppressing the visible trace of the brush or hand. This is less a pursuit of perfection than a means of questioning the value placed on originality, spontaneity and individual authorship. By drawing upon the languages of photography, reproduction and the copy, his paintings redirect attention away from the artist as originator and towards the technological, economic, unconscious and material structures through which images and subjects are produced.

    His images often contain elements of staging and framing, subtly referring to art-making itself as a form of address. Like the objects they depict, the paintings remain incomplete, depending upon the viewer to produce meaning. Across the work, Andrew asks what lies beneath appearances and what forms of intelligence, desire and dependency exceed the self-sufficient human subject.

    • 2012 MFA Fine Art, Goldsmiths, University of London

    • 2001 Post Graduate Diploma Narrative Writing, University of Derby

    • 1996 BA (1st class hons) Photographic Studies, University of Derby

    • 1992 BTEC Foundation in Art and Design, Tresham College, Kettering

    • 2026 Contemporary British Painting Prize, Yorkshire Artspace, Sheffield | Thames-Side Studios, London

    • 2026 Ghosts of All We've Ever Been, Krowji, Redruth

    • 2025 Cold Feed, Workplace, London

    • 2024 Creative Kernow Associates | Flamm | Manchester Contemporary, Manchester

    • 2024 Ud Rocashaas, Hweg, Penzance

    • 2023 Rapture, Tremenheere Gallery, Gulval

    • 2022 Contemporary British Painting Prize (shortlisted artist), Huddersfield Art Gallery and Thames-side Studios Gallery, London

    • 2022 Unstable Monuments, Bristol

    • 2022 Rhizome, Tremenheere Gallery, Gulval

    • 2022 Group show, Chapel House, Penzance

    • 2021 In the Shadow of the Object (solo exhibition), Dust: The Art of Grief, Penzance

    • 2021 Wells Art Contemporary (shortlisted artist), Wells Cathedral, Wells

    • 2018 Open Studios, Old Bakery Studios, Truro

    • 2016 Open Studios, Old Press, St. Austell 

    • 2012 Q-Art, APT Gallery, London

    • 2011 Skin Job (curator), Core Gallery, London

    • 2010 The Eighteenth Emergency (curator), Core Gallery, London

    • 2010 Q-Art, Matt Roberts Gallery, London

    • 2010 Presequel (curator), Goldsmiths College, London

    • 2010 B-sides, Goldsmiths College, London

    • 2007 Total Image Nation, Chocolate Factory, London

    • 2007 Illuminations with (Carol Marin-Pache), My Life in Art, London

    • 2003 Punctuation Marks, Leicester City Gallery

    • 2003 You Are Here, various venues, Nottingham

    • 2001 This is Not Home (solo show), Q Studios, Derby

    • 2000 Turning the Page (winner: Best alternative media artist’s book prize), Picture House Gallery, Leicester

    • 1999 Intimate Land (solo show), Big Blue Cafe Gallery, Derby

    • 1999 Cracking Up, Pink House, Nottingham

    • 1997 Notes in Passing, Picture House Gallery, Leicester

    • 1997 Young Photographers, Montage Gallery, Derby

    • 1993 Two Photographers, Picture House Gallery, Leicester

    • 2026 CKA x Krowji Project Space Residency

    • 2026 Shortlisted for the Contemporary British Painting Prize

    • 2024 Creative Kernow Associates | Flamm | Manchester Contemporary Selected Artist

    • 2022 Shortlisted for the Contemporary British Painting Prize

    • 2021 Shortlisted for Wells Art Contemporary

    • 2021 Long-listed for the Jackson’s Painting Prize

    • 2021 Newlyn School of Art, One Year Mentoring Bursary

    • 2000 East Midlands Arts Writers’ Award (Arts Council of England regional bursary)

    • 1995 Exchange Scholarship, Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem

    • 1993 Winner, best use of alternative media, Leicester Picture House Artists Book Prize 

    • 2013 Birds of a Feather, a-n Magazine, April 2013

    • 2012 A Good Blog, a-n Magazine Jan 2012

    • 2011 Artists Talking… Talking, a-n Magazine Nov 2011

    • 2010 The Teaching and Learning of Art; or How to Avoid Being Eaten by a Giraffe, Esferapública Columbia, June 2010 (first appeared in Q-Art London, 2009 and Hit and Miss 3, 2009)

    • 2009 Why Professional Artists Need a Blog, a-n June 2009

    • 2008 Artists Talking — Internationally, a-n magazine September 2008

    • 2008 The Show Must Go On, a-n magazine July/August 2008