Andrew James Collins bridges the urban grit of Brooklyn and the heritage of Dublin to create works that interrogate history through a playful, subversive lens.
A graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, Collins has exhibited throughout the United States and Ireland, as well as in the UK with Toxic Arts Gallery. His work is deeply informed by a background in graffiti, street art, cartoons, and comics—Collins repurposes the frantic energy of street art and the flattened irony of comic book aesthetics to dismantle personal and collective histories with process and material driven painting and sculptural work.
Through residencies at the National Sculpture Factory and Meitheal Mara in Ireland, and at Gallery eLL in New York City, he has developed a body of work that engages themes of memory, nostalgia, and the passage of time. Collins employs strategies of image appropriation, abstraction and mutation to explore the severance of pictorial depiction from its initial conditions of production and reception, enabling the emergence of new relational possibilities within his body of work. These works engage with appropriation and painting as both method and critical position, foregrounding the instability of authorship, originality, and image circulation within contemporary culture through the transformation of a diverse range of visual ephemera.
andrewcollinsarts@gmail.com