Overview
André Hemer is a New Zealand artist based in Vienna whose painting and moving image works blend traditional painting and digital processes.
His painting seeks to embody a new paradigmatic experience of the world that shifts seamlessly between material and dematerialized form. The result is a sensuous representation of contemporary experience, which, like all art, speaks to its moment of making, reflecting our contemporary viewing and experience of the world via online platforms. Ironically also, these complex, deeply-layered, luscious works seductively call to be experienced directly and viscerally, and in that experience show up the absence of the sensory and the second-handedness of much of the online experience.
While early works focused on translating computer-generated imagery to hand-made painting, more recent work is about blurring the boundaries, and creating a new kind of representation. His highly sought after works of recent years or so have their foundation in outdoor scans made in different places and at different times of day. This mode of making embraces and integrates the digital and the handmade – printed imagery from computer or scanner combines with layers of spray paint, oil, acrylic and thick impasto.
The result is a sensuous amalgam of hybrid forms of image making — a complex and teasing interplay between flatness and three-dimensional tactility. His work brings together documentary and a visual imaginary that suggests both Turner's skies and 'strawberry fields' where 'nothing is real' or quite what it seems. There’s a sense of fun, chance and wit. Hemer refers to scanning ‘en plein air’, placing himself on the continuum from early outdoor landscape painters taking their chances with light and weather to his production of images that he describes as ‘both naturalistic but also speaking to something either a little hyper-real or digitally manifested’.
Hemer also produces moving image works and sculptures from 3-D prints of paintings.
Bio
André Hemer completed a Master of Fine Arts at the University of Canterbury in 2006 and in 2015 a PhD in Fine Arts at the University of Sydney.
Hemer lives in Vienna and is represented by galleries in London, New York, Los Angeles, Singapore and Sydney as well as New Zealand. Exhibitions include: NFTism, curated by Kenny Schachter, Institut Co (2021); Watching Windows, curated by Andrew Clifford, Te Uru Contemporary Museum, Auckland (2017); André Hemer – Paintings 2005- 2015, Pataka Art + Museum, Porirua City, New Zealand (2015); Utopian Days, curated by Martin Schulze and Hailey Grenet, Total Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul, Korea (2014); and Critical Intent, curated by Gary Sangster and Fan Lin, Guangzhou Art Center, Guangzhou, China (2014).
His work is in the collections of Taiwan Museum of Art; Te Manawa Museum (NZ); Christchurch Art Gallery (NZ); and University of Canterbury (NZ), amongst others. In 2016 Hemer was awarded the prestigious New Paramount Award from the Wallace Arts Trust and the New Zealand Arts Foundation New Generation Award. Artist residencies include: The Studios at MASS MoCA, Massachusetts, USA (2020); International Studio and Curatorial Program, New York, USA (2017), Cité International des Arts, Paris, France (2015); Arts Tasmania, Hobart, Australia (2015); amongst others.
