André Hemer

b. 1981, NZ
Lives and works in Vienna, Austria

André Hemer has built a strong international reputation for creating highly finessed artworks that blur the distinctions between physical and digital art making. His practice is painting based, though incorporates elements of other media, particularly digital photography, image manipulation, and printmaking. Hemer often makes use of scans of paint marks and found objects to create digital imagery. These images are digitally manipulated, printed, and then over-painted with highly textural applications of paint. Ostensibly abstract, his works can also register as subtly representational; in areas they literally depict paint, flora, and skies. As such, these artworks are uniquely hybridised explorations of contemporary image-making.

Hemer often creates work that responds to his environment, including visual data from specific locations. He produced the scans for his work from a diverse range of locations, including Australia, USA, Europe, and at home in New Zealand. With their rich palettes and bustling compositions, Hemer’s recent works intentionally reference the extravagant stylistic flair of 17th Century Baroque art. Yet, his visual language has no real precedents. The artist effectively straddles digital and conventional print methods to create a new type of hybrid image making, one that purposefully engages with the dynamic friction between digital and physical media.

Already a highly accomplished artist, Hemer is continuing to develop the sophisticated practice that he is known for. Central to this is his exploration of the emergent artistic possibilities arising from digital technology. This is a space ripe for innovation, and Hemer is among the vanguard of artists operating in this area internationally. He holds a Master of Fine Arts (Distinction) from the University of Canterbury and a PhD in painting from the University of Sydney. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Arts Foundation New Generation Award (2016), The National Contemporary Art Award, Waikato Museum (2011), and the Bold Horizons Contemporary Art Award (2011). He has secured various international residencies and exhibited extensively in New Zealand, Australia, Korea, Taiwan, Germany, and the United Kingdom. His work continues to attract international attention, affirming him as an international artist to watch.

Gow Langsford Gallery has represented André Hemer since 2015.

New Representation Part III, Andre Hemer’s debut solo exhibition at Gow Langsford Gallery is an exhibition of paintings that are a response, but not necessarily an answer, to this question. The new paintings continue the artist’s inquiry into the role of painting in a world dominated by digital media and the slippages in meaning between object and image. “Hemer describes his work as embodying a ‘new representation’, a term he coined during his PhD to describe the painting he is making. “You have these terms like post-internet but new representation speaks more generally to the idea that, because the way we consume and create media has changed so markedly over the last decade, the way we represent the world must change because of that. This is about how you represent all this dematerialized form in the world – how you rematerialize it.” (Mark Amery, Art Collector, 2016)

Hemer’s approach to painting is typically y-gen in its use of both physical and digital mechanisms. Using a method akin to a modern day ‘en plein air’ painting (a flat-bed scanner left open under the autumn sky of Tuscany) Hemer scans painted sculptural forms to create the background of his compositions. The combination of the light sources (the LED light of the scanner from below and the fading sunlight) create images that look digital but are not produced in a digital way. The images are then overworked with spray paint, acrylic, oil and very three-dimensional impasto to create visually dynamic compositions. The combination of techniques is reflected in the difficulty in describing the finished works in more traditional painting terms.

Hemer’s works have earned him international recognition. His work is on the cover of Thames and Hudson’s publication 100 Painters of Tomorrow (2014). The book uncovered the world’s most promising painters from more than 30 countries. He was also named by The Guardian newspaper as one of their top ten favourites to watch.