Bangkok Mosaic

Andrew Stahl

11 Dec 2003 - 04 Jan 2004

From mid June to mid September this year (2003) Andrew Stahl was artist in residence at Silpakorn University, Bangkok. His paintings are attempts to make the most euphoric and advanced paintings possible without any sacrifice or reduction in their ultimately romantic vision and goal. The paintings are intended to belong to the future space city of Bangkok 


These paintings are a response to hot days on the top floor of Silpakorn University where his body would turn to water while the paintings appeared. Feelings of euphoria on the futuristic expressways of Bangkok, the billboards suspended in mid air with cyber babies with mobile phone antennas in communication across the future airwaves and airways. A skyscraper city sparkling at night when you sit suspended in mid air in your vehicle cyber rocket, the lights winking and turning into mosaics of colours. One large painting is of a cyber baby and the other is her spaceship. The deep red painting is of the moment when the blood rushes to the head because you’ve seen another red painting.


The fragments of all the paintings and drawings add up to a mosaic of a summer spent mainly in Bangkok, he wants them to touch on what seem to be contemporary issues in painting: - how abstract or how figurative? How clever how dumb? How confident how shy? Or perhaps how absent how present how dense? How slow, how fast? How beautiful how rough?  How playful how critical and how mad paintings and drawings can be.


Andrew Stahl’s most recent solo shows have been in London, Germany, Belfast, and in Thailand in Chiangmai and Bangkok funded by the British Council. Also group shows in the U.K., United States and Northern Ireland. He is included in numerous private and public collections including: Metropolitan Museum Of Art New York, Arts Council of Great Britain, British Museum, British Council, and Contemporary Arts Society. He is currently Head Of Undergraduate Painting at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College, London. In London he is represented by Flowers East.