Andrew Ekins employs a concoction of materials to create paintings that explore the materiality of painting while investigating the embodiment of contemporary notions of beauty and the sublime. Brown Sugar is an expression of a confection of degraded beauty that allows the process of making and a system of applying paint to draw attention to it as a made object. The resonant caramel colours of the tanning industry and decorative language establish a visual honey trap that is, on further inspection, complicated by the frayed, crumbling, eroded structure of Mandlebrot like ornamentation over the delicacy of black lace work. The title has many connotations from the sickly-sweet allure of narcotics, to the dark and corrupt basis of the sugar industries. The implication is of an ugly, doublespeak-truth living beneath a cosmetic skin.

Unit 7 2nd Floor, Studio 13.
e-mail: andrewekins@mac.com