Andrew Gilbert

Andrew Gilbert obsessively and scrupulously pursues his reflection on conquest and colonial wars through a fierce and bloody portrait gallery. In his drawings, the battles and the wars become the absurd stage of military feats, the unsteady socle upon which the idea of nation is built. 

The 39 years old Scottish artist is a true connoisseur of European history as it unfolded both in situ and through the wars of conquests, particularly in Africa and India. 

He uses the“feats" of military heroes to draw scenes of open cruelty, and applies the same treatment to the colonial wars of the British empire and the Napoleonic wars. 

What Andrew Gilbert offers here is a very personal re-elaboration of traditional historical painting, with a sharp eye and without abandoning his strident humour.

In this shooting gallery, the protagonists of all the conflicts are equal: Zulus, Sudanese, Hottentots and Boers mingle with the victims of wars on the European soil, and the lustre of Napoleonic uniforms stands alongside the flamboyant kota masks, fetishes and macabre trophies.

Andrew Gilbert, who has been living in Berlin for ten years, draws every day, surrounded by a library worthy of a historian. In these books he obsessively searches for the details which we find, in a transfigured form, in his drawings: costume decorations, positions of battalions, quotations, etc.

Andrew Gilbert presents a sharp perspective, with neither limits nor reserves, supported by a trained and referenced trait. In this barbaric world, marked by a brutal symbolism, where savagery is not necessarily where we expect to find it, nothing escapes him. His drawings are extravagant, cruel, documented, and contemporary.