Andrews’ distinctive approach to gestural abstraction combines compositional risk-taking with an almost casual disregard for perfection, alluding at once to the sprawling geographies of America’s countrysides, coastlines, and roadways and to the stop-and-start journey of the art-making process itself.
Painting at different speeds and intensities, Andrews juxtaposes airy atmospheric effects and densely textured linework with contractor-style, rolled-on color. She works primarily with unprimed canvas and paper, ripping, tearing, sewing, and taping as she paints to discover unexpected solutions to formal problems while leaving the raw edges and roughness of the process visible in each finished work. Building equally on 60s lyrical abstraction and more recent developments in process-based painting, the bold insouciance of Andrews’ approach to color, form, and mark-making is unmistakably her own. As bustling as a construction zone or as boundless as the open road, the work is always unpremeditated yet infused with a sense of spatial possibility.
Born in Southern California in 1952, Ash Andrews personified the West Coast ethos of freewheeling adventure, riding bareback across the Santa Monica Mountains at the age of thirteen and taking numerous cross-country road trips along Route 66. Following a career in journalism, Andrews dedicated herself full-time to art-making, attending the New York Studio School and the Art Students League of New York. At the Art Students League, she studied under Larry Poons, who encouraged her investigation into free and loose gestural abstraction.
Over the past two decades, Andrews has steadily built up a formidable body of work for which she is only belatedly receiving her due recognition. In 2011, Walter Liedtke, a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, praised the “confident personality” of her paintings, “in which whimsy and inspired detours tug excitedly at the leash of strong composition.” Andrews has studios in Florida and New York and divides her time between the two states.
