ANDREW BOND – Horseplay in a Time Before Ege Bamyasi – 9 Sept-3 Oct 2025

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‘The past is a foreign country’, so begins L P Hartley’s 1953 novel The Go Between. A line that beautifully captures the elusive nature of memory. Most of us recall the past as fragmented moments, hard visual or audible information that we flesh out with imagined scenarios that validate our personal agendas. The Law Courts understand this very well, and treat eye witness testimony with caution. This being said, my aim for this group of paintings is to take the concocted filler, and replace it with visual imagery that goes out of its way to disrupt any logical narrative that we might attach to our core memory. The result being a manifestation of ‘the other’. Something that was but wasn’t, a no-mans land of half truths and outright lies.

The hard truths are drawn from historical art images such as Lucas Cranach the Elder’s Adam and Eve, George Stubbs animal anatomy studies, and drawings by Albrecht Durer of sacrificial vessels, to name a few. Others come from my own personal family stories, such as the arrival of my first ancestor into Aotearoa in 1862, via a sailing ship called The Bombay. I then layer in recognisable figuration and symbols that may or may not fit the unfolding narritive. And, then of course there are the hybrid beings, part one thing and part another. There is nothing new here, this harks back to the use of ‘droleries’ painted around the illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages.

Beyond the hard truths lies the freedom of imaginative image-making. An adult form of ‘pretend’; that core device that children use to navigate their world. Maybe creativity is the grown up manifestation of this. All this unfolds upon highly saturated colour fields of background paint that could arguably be seen as completed works in their own right. As the paintings develop they begin to reveal their own internal truths. From these, stories evolve that are personal to me and nonsensical to others. But that’s the point: I want each viewer to create their own personal narrative or interpretation, one that becomes fluid and changes with each new encounter.

Finally a few words on ‘Ege Bamyasi’, Turkish for ‘Aegean Okra’, but a quick Google search won’t give you this as its primary answer. What comes up is the 1972 album by the Krautrock band CAN. The album’s cover features a picture of a can of processed vegetables namely said okra. A picture that was chosen as an homage to Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s soup cans, and the post modernist art movement of the time. ‘Can’ means ‘Life’ in Turkish.

Therefore Horseplay in a time before Ege Bamyasi could be interpreted as horseplay in a time before post-modernism, or horseplay in a time before 1972, the time when I was a child. The time when ‘pretend’ was central to my thinking and how I navigated the world.

– Andrew Bond

 

 

 

Ōtautahi-based artist Andrew Bond centres his artistic practice around the shared human faculty of imagination or, simply put, the childlike impulse to ‘pretend’. He believes that creativity in adulthood is essentially an extension of this fundamental human need.

For Andrew, this manifests through paintings filled with recognisable figures and objects inhabiting self-contained worlds. These worlds bear little resemblance to rational or real-world contexts, yet they convey a compelling narrative presence.

Influenced by music, stories, poetry, history, and generously seasoned with the absurdist philosophy of Albert Camus, Andrew meticulously layers detailed figurative forms over vividly saturated backgrounds. Each painting reveals its own internal truths, free from the constraints of physics or the natural laws of the material world.

After receiving his BFA (1st Class Honours, 2021) and MFA (with Distinction, 2022) from Canterbury University, Andrew has dedicated himself to his artistic practice full-time. This exhibition marks his third presentation at PGgallery192.