It has been immensely satisfying to observe and support the development of Andre's career over the past ten years. We offer Andre our congratulations on his achievements of recent months -- the completion of his PhD, his selection for the cover of the October 2014 Thames & Hudson book 100 Painters of Tomorrow and his winning of a residency at the Mora Drying Studio in Paris, awarded by the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Andre travels to Europe to take up the residency in May 2015.

New Representation Part II follows the sell-out success of Andre's exhibition New Representation in Sydney in February. As traditional representational painting depicts the world, so too, paradoxically, do Andre's seemingly abstract paintings. While these paintings with their sensuous and dynamic use of thick impasto gestures are perhaps his most painterly to date, they are an amalgamation of hybrid forms of media and image making -- a complex and teasing interplay between image and object. The artist is proposing what he calls a new mode of representation that allows his paintings to navigate, embrace and represent the transaction between the digital and material. As he says:

A painting acts a remnant to these transactions, recording them and allowing us to consider them detached from their usual form of distribution.

Painting tells us much more than we might initially think. It allows us to see a representation of the world in an unashamedly old-fashioned way. It slows us down and makes us reconsider the image and object-hood in a different way from which we now experience much of the world around us. It reminds us that visuality does hold importance in conveying the shifts in our culture and that our experience of the image might once again be able to slow-down.

For me, painting is way of recording the world in a way that connects the intimacy of the creative act with the larger cultural conditions that exist in the time of making. For this reason, I am drawn to painting because of the potential to state something that could not be done in any other form. A painting has its own life -- which is materially at least, a very simple one. This simplicity gives it the potential for a kind of cultural longevity -- a life and revealing of itself long after the creative act, and without reliance on any technological playback system.

Words from an interview with Oliver Watts.

Andre Hemer (b.1981 Queenstown, New Zealand) is currently based in Australia. He has a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Canterbury and has recently completed a PhD at the University of Sydney. He has exhibited throughout New Zealand and Australia and in Asia and Europe.