During the Summer of 2021, M HKA museum made a small retrospective of the work of British artist Andrew Webb (1966-2019). To honour Andrew we will organise an exhibition with paintings and other works he was preparing for his exhibition at our gallery in 2019 when he suddenly died February 2019. Webb was born in Warwickshire, England, and studied at Goldsmith's College, University of London. After a short stay in Spain, he and his partner Jon Thompson moved to Belgium in the mid-1990s, where he lived first in Antwerp and then in Brussels until 2008. From 2008 he lived and worked in Sandwich (Kent, England).
Andrew Webb's oeuvre initially consists of conceptually based objects and collages. Although influenced by Dadaism and Surrealism, his work is definitely contemporary and makes frequent use of language with visual and phonetic puns and anagrams, humour and eroticism. Jean Fisher (1942 - 2016) wrote: "Webb works with the visual-verbal pun, the anagram and the portmanteau word that more often than not hide a sexual meaning. They form the hinge what Duchamp called a 'corridor of humour' through which our expectations of language and meaning are disrupted and experience is opened up to the play of fantasy."
From 2011 Andrew concentrated on painting with his own typical brushwork in oil on canvas. The last paintings refer to his important spatial works: The aristocratic Hairline Machine, The Line of Saved, and the use of missals in his collages and sculptures.