East, London
Andrew Heard
I Want to Be Good
Amanda WilkinsonAmanda Wilkinson presents the first exhibition of Andrew Heard’s paintings in the United Kingdom in more than three decades. Heard’s post-pop paintings of the 1980s and early 1990s often integrated ‘low’ cultural references from British and American TV, film and music hall, with biting, sardonic or sad textual components. His most characteristic paintings of the 1980s centre iconic but already passé or parochial personae from British popular culture: Charles Hawtrey, Kenneth Williams; or stars of ‘Golden Era’ British cinema, like Rita Tushingham, Deborah Kerr, and Albert Finney. Art critic Louisa Buck wrote of Heard that ‘no artist has been as successful in capturing the tawdry Carry-On culture of Britain in the late Fifties and Sixties with its forgotten jingles, minor celebrities and suburban sitcoms. Yet there is nothing whimsical about Heard’s sharply witty, hard-edged [paintings].’ They are suffused with a melancholic attachment to a lost Britishness deemed both hallowed and ridiculous. This attachment is sincere and derisive, nostalgic and pejorative, and his wry humour is also attached to other orders of images, including gay-coded objects of attraction, like male pinups, boxers, and skinheads. In 1988, after the death of his friend and former partner David Robilliard, Heard’s aesthetic sensibility took a more melancholic turn. His later paintings, including I Want to be Good (1992), which gives this exhibition its title, are shaped by the structures of feeling associated with HIV/AIDS, including fear, stigma, loss and grief. Heard was born in Hertford, England in 1958, and studied at Chelsea School of Art (1979-80). He was ambitious, prolific and critically and commercially successful in his lifetime: he had many solo exhibitions in the UK and Europe in the 1980s and 1990s, including at: Connaught Brown and Salama-Caro Gallery, London; Turke & Turske, Zurich; Art + Project, Amsterdam; and Friedman Guinness, Frankfurt/Heidelberg; and he participated in group exhibitions at Whitechapel Art Gallery (1986, 1987, 1992), Riverside Studios (1985, 1986), Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (1985) and Royal Festival Hall (1982) among others. His paintings are held in the permanent collection of Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, and in international private collections. He was highly regarded by major contemporary artists including his mentors Gilbert & George, as well as by David Hockney, John Stezaker, and Derek Jarman, all of whom supported and/or wrote about his work. Heard died from an AIDS-related illness in London in January 1993.