WAKEFIELD.- This November, The The Hepworth Wakefield became the first public gallery to present a solo exhibition of works by Andrew Cranston. Andrew Cranston: What made you stop here? features 38 new and recent paintings that range from large-scale canvases to intimate works painted on old linen-bound book covers, comprising subjects that include still life, landscape, seascape, portraits, and interior scenes.

Engaging with the layered emotional quality and pathos of everyday life, as well as a strong sense of place, be it real or imagined, Cranston’s evocatively titled paintings contain compelling and intriguing narratives that have the collaged dream-like quality of recollection and what he calls ‘creative misremembering’.

His formally inventive and highly intimate paintings find new ways to connect the personal and art historical past with the present through a gamut of visual and literary references and shared experiences. The paintings exploit what is perhaps only glanced existing in the periphery of vision and embody a sense of revelation, wonder and oddness in familiar situations. Connections and highly personal associations are deeply entwined in these works creating a rewarding and memorable experience.

On display at The Hepworth Wakefield for the first time is one of Cranston’s most recent paintings entitled, A snake came to my coffee table on a hot, hot day to drink there (2023), which has been generously acquired for Wakefield’s art collection through the JW Anderson Collections Fund. It features what Cranston says is ‘an intrusion of something alien into the familiar, an unlikely presence and threat into the domestic’. A large number of other works in the exhibition, lent from private collections, have never been shown publicly before.

Andrew Cranston was born in Hawick in the Scottish Borders in 1969, and now lives and works in Glasgow, Scotland. Cranston studied at Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen and then completed his postgraduate study at the Royal College of Art, where he was taught by Peter Doig and Adrian Berg.

The Hepworth Wakefield's is also holding the first release with Andrew Cranston.

"The print is a four plate etching I have made with the assistance of Al Gow at Glasgow Print Studio. It is based on a memory of a rectangular fishpond in the atrium of the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh.

I see the image as a vehicle, a metaphor, for expressing some anguish about international affairs, the consistent shifting dread of conflict and its actuality. Fish as substitutes for submarines and frigates. I was thinking of a game of battleships, shapes placed on a grid.

It could also be simply an image describing the beauty of fish." - Andrew Cranston

The Hepworth Wakefield
Andrew Cranston: What made you stop here?
25 November 2023 – 2 June 2024