Andrew Vickery creates paintings that are full of charm, memory and subversion. By employing nostalgia and familiar cultural references, he offers an invitation to the viewer to participate in creating a narrative to accompany his paintings. The works are without figures, only the tracings of a past event remain, the scene of some unknown happening or circumstance. The viewers immediately use their own history to participate in Vickery’s story.
Beyond the Sea (2006) comprises 24 small paintings organised into a sequence to suggest a story line. Vickery amplifies and focuses the dramatic element by transforming these paintings into a slide presentation, back projected onto a miniaturised theatre stage. This exhibition will consist of two of these slide installations: Theatre (1999) and Beyond the Sea (2006), along with the works on paper and larger works on canvas.
‘There is a dynamic oscillation in our perception of the paintings as ‘painting’ and the paintings as ‘scenes’. On the wall the paintings act as individual mnemonic devices, evoking recollections of childhood from the sixties and early seventies.
Theatrical sensibility is evident in the organisation of space into foreground (front of stage), mid-ground and background. It is as if the artist perceives how the event is blocked out (in a directing sense) by the props that surround the action. In that way the paintings appear to have a naive sense of spatial composition. Though unlike some of his peers who use a faux naivety to create an ironic distance from their subjects, Vickery’s deployment of this technique suffers no irony but adds a childlike poignancy to these recollected moments.
Extract from ‘Vickery’s Jackanory’ by Patrick T Murphy. Full essay published in exhibition catalogue.

Selection of images from exhibition