Andrew Bryant is an artist based in Cornwall, UK

Andrew Bryant was born in the UK in 1971 and lives and works in Cornwall. He has worked as an art educator and freelance editor, including for a-n and Tate Online, and is a visiting tutor at Newlyn School of Art. In 2022 he was shortlisted for the Contemporary British Painting Prize. His work is held in private collections in the UK and abroad.

Andrew’s practice is informed by a lifelong engagement with art and image-making, alongside interests in psychoanalysis, post-humanism, and contemporary debates around artificial intelligence and climate change. His work explores how surface, texture and materiality shape — and sometimes distort — our perception of the world, considering how appearances can both expose and obscure deeper truths.

Drawing on print, the internet, AI-generated hybrid imagery and his own photography, Andrew makes meticulous paintings (and occasionally drawings) of isolated objects that often appear fragile, lacking or incomplete. These objects seem caught between function and failure: missing an essential part, unable to act on their own, or suspended in a state of unresolved dependency. Through them, his work addresses contemporary fantasies of autonomy and self-sufficiency, while pointing to the psychic, social, material and ecological dependencies such fantasies seek to deny.

For Andrew, painting is a form of translation: a slow, attentive and rigorous process through which images are re-made. Spending months, sometimes years, on a single work, he gives forensic attention to surface nuance while suppressing the visible trace of the brush or hand. This is not a senseless pursuit of perfection, but a way of resisting the fetishisation of originality, spontaneity and individual authorship. By referencing the discursive spaces of photography, reproduction and the copy, the paintings redirect attention away from the artist as originator and towards the wider structures — technological, economic, unconscious and material — through which images and subjects are produced.

His images often include elements of staging and framing, subtly referring to art-making itself as a form of address. Like the objects they depict, the paintings are also incomplete: they depend on the viewer to provide meaning. Whether engaging with geological processes, mortuary objects, artificial intelligence or the unstable surfaces of found images, Andrew’s work asks what lies beneath appearances, and what forms of intelligence, desire and dependency exceed the human subject.

Education

  • 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

Awards and bursaries

  • 2024 Creative Kernow Associates | Flamm | Manchester Contemporary

  • 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 ACE creative writing bursary, Arts Council England

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

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

Selected exhibitions

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

  • 2025 Cold Feed, Workplace, London

  • 2024 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

Publicity

Published writing

  • 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