Andrew Pope
Private Property

Extended through May 24, 2020

Ampersand is pleased to present Private Property, an exhibition of paintings by New York artist Andrew Pope. The title painting in the show presents a lone house amid an empty field at the base of a barren hillside. Or is it near the edge of a green plateau, beyond which a river canyon cuts and a snowy mountain stands in the distance? If the latter, perhaps it’s spring and the blue of the sky suggests something more alive—birdsong, the smell of new grass, warm sun on your shoulders. This dichotomy of perspective is present throughout much of Pope’s work. There is beauty in each of his paintings, a hint of something pastoral, but a sense of isolation also pervades. In this sense the notion of private property is both literal and suggestive. Many of the paintings seem to depict geographic features you might find on private lands. The woodlots, rivers and less traveled roads that encompass, border or end at homesteads. Real or imaginary places that are far from towns and cities. And Pope admits that, generally speaking, he’s a private person. “I don’t like to share much of myself,” he says, mentioning that the paintings come from a private place or that his head is a private space. In this sense, we are looking at paintings that are more akin to the work of a storyteller or poet. The paintings may represent possible places we can dream about, but they also stand in for facets of real life. When he notes the deaths of two friends during the period in which the works were made, the predominate absence of people in his paintings presents a new depth of potential meaning. The vacant houses may be what we all leave behind. There is also something slow and meditative about these paintings, as though the teller is walking through these lands, not passing by in a speeding car. But who is the narrator? Is it Pope himself, as the semblance of one rare figure in a few of his paintings suggests? Or is that person some made-up, last man standing? “Like much or most of my work," he says, “a sense of isolation inhabits all of these paintings. I can’t say it was my concerted intention to do that in any of them but it’s the result nonetheless. Sometimes I look at a painting I make and think, who the hell made that and why? And sometimes they are perfectly good paintings. But I just don’t feel very connected to them. And others I see and think, oh yes, this is exactly the sort of thing I’d paint because it’s exactly how I see, feel and think. And those are the paintings that are in this show. They feel just right to me, and that’s a rare thing."

Andrew Pope lives and works in New York, New York. He is originally from Atlanta, Georgia. He graduated from the University of Georgia with a degree in English literature. After collaborating with Raymond Pettibon on a limited edition zine of their drawings in 2015, he began a shift to painting. His artwork has been exhibited in group shows at Half Gallery (New York) in 2016, Galerie Sebastien Bertrand (Geneva) in 2017, and Turn Gallery (New York) in 2018, among others. His first solo exhibition, Lonescape, was at Fortnight Institute (New York) in 2019. This is his first exhibition at Ampersand.