Contact:
Instagram: michaelandrewpage
Born 1989, Northampton, UK
Lives and works in London
2012-2014 Royal College of Art, London, MA Painting
2008-2012 Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, BA Fine Art
2007-2008 Byam Shaw School of Art, UAL, Foundation
SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2019 FYSSHYNGE, Gao Gallery, London UK
2015 Art Rotterdam 15, Edel Assanti, Rotterdam, NL
2014 Count the leaves in Vallombrosa, Edel Assanti, London, UK
SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2018 Group Show, Gao Gallery, London, UK
Xenia Bond, Valerie Kong, Michael Andrew Page, Sam Risley, Joel Wycherley, Yi Zhang
2017 The Sleeping Procession, Cass Sculpture Foundation, UK
Curated by Sean Steadman & Gabriel Hartley
Matt Ager, Rebecca Ackroyd, Marijke Appleman, Alvarro Barrington, Sara Barker,
Anthony Caro, Stewart Cliff, Karen di Franco, Kira Freije, Elizabeth Frink, Cristina
Garrido, Peter Hide, Sebastian Jefford, Phillip King, Hannah Lees, Eddie Martinez,
Ellis O'Connell, Michael Andrew Page, Eduardo Paolozzi, Peter Peri, Peter Lazlo Peri,
Dieter Roth, Alex Scarfe, Lindsay Seers, Frederick Sommer and Bill Woodrow
2016 Shrines to Speed, Leila Heller Gallery, New York, USA
Curated by Vivian Brody and Alexander Heller
Ron Arad, Arman, Daniel Arsham, John Baldessari, Jean Michel Basquiat, Robert
Bechtle, Bruce High Quality Foundation, John Chamberlain, Bruce Davidson. Wim
Delvoye, Richard Diebenkorn, William Eggelston, Richard Estes, Nick Farhi, Louis
Faurer, Sylvie Fleury, John Aaron Frank, William Gedney, Dennis Hopper, William
Klein, Jeff Koons, Jacques Henri Latrigue, Arthur Leipzig, Nate Lowman, Jonathan
Monk, Robert Olsen, Ruth Orkin, Kaz Oshiro, Michael Andrew Page, Raymond
Pettibon, Jack Pierson, Richard Prince, Dana Powell, Rob Pruitt, Robert
Rauschenberg, Ed Ruscha, Salvatore Scarpitta, Blair Thurman, Robert Williams,
Andy Warhol, Aaron Young
2015 The Frivolous Now, Alon Zakaim Fine Art, London, UK
Dylan Lynch, Chloe Wise, Carly Mark, Joe Kay, Michael Andrew
Page, Nick Farhi, Charles Lutz, Julio Felix, Nicole Reber, Ahmet
Civelek, Henry Levy (Curated by Julio Felix, In Conjunction with
Young And Starving)
2014 Starter (Curated by Andrew Stahl), L’Escargot, London, UK
RCA SHOW ’14, Royal College of Art, London, UK
Dean’s Suite, (Group) Royal College of Art, London, UK
Stewart’s Law RCA Secret, Royal College of Art, London, UK
2013 PNTG NOV, Royal College of Art, London, UK
RCA Secret '13, Royal College of Art, London, UK
Notes to Self, Dyson Gallery, Royal College of Art, London
RCA Interim Show, Royal College of Art, London, UK
2012 Slade School of Fine Art BA/BFA Degree Show, London, UK
2010 Jerwood Drawing Prize 2010, JVA Space, London, UK
The Arts Club Members Exhibition, London, UK
Open Studios, Slade School of Fine Art, London, UK
The Common Room, Mare Street Studios, London, UK
Off Modern, Corsica Studios, Elephant & Castle, London, UK
2009 Start, The Rag Factory, London, UK
RESIDENCIES
2014 Land Securities Studio Residency, Bow Arts Trust, London, UK
AWARDS/SCHOLARSHIPS
2014 Land Securities Studio Award, London, UK
2014 Chadwell Award, Shortlisted Artist, London, UK
2011 Osborne’s Solicitors Art Prize, Shortlisted Artist, UK
2010 Jerwood Drawing Prize, Shortlisted Artist, JVA, London, UK
2010 Excellence in Drawing Award (First Prize), Dover Street Arts Club,
London, UK
2009 Excellence in Drawing Award (Runner-up), Dover Street Arts Club,
London, UK
2009 Painting Scholarship Prize, Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, UK
2009 Sir Andrew Taylor Prize for Fine Art Research, UCL, UK
BIBLIOGRAPHY/PRESS
2016 Shrines to Speed, Leila Heller Gallery, NY (Publication)
2015 The Frivolous Now, Wall Street International Magazine (Online)
2014 Michael Andrew Page: Count The Leaves in Vallombrosa, Kolekto
Magazine, Will Davie, (online)
2014 Michael Andrew Page Cut and Pastes Cultural History at Edel Assanti,
Artsy Editorial, Hannah Gregory.
2014 Martian Sunsets are Blue, RCA Show 2014 Painting Catalogue,
Emmerson Press, UK
2013 Pageobium, Self-Published Risograph Fanzine, RCA Thesis
2011 Papa Jupiter And The Primal Horde: An Institutionalized Context of
Anthropophagy Self-published edition of artist writing, Michael Andrew
Page.
2010 Jerwood Drawing Prize 2010 Catalogue, Ed. Siobhan Kneale.
Was it for this
That one, the fairest of all Rivers, lov’d
To blend his murmurs with my Nurse’s song,
And from his alder shades and rocky falls,
And from his fords and shallows, sent a voice
That flow’d along my dreams?
–—William Wordsworth
FYSSHYNGE is an exhibition that deals with flows of time.
Fishing boxes drawn in monumental scale, they evoke platonic solids-cum-architectural follies. Extremities kissing the perimeter of drawn space, they are realised in maniacal crosshatched detail. These are plans saturated in labour-time, lovingly and tortuously rendered but once finished emerging into an atemporal repose. Fixed in perspective the boxes are all that seems to exist, no relational scale objects, no rulers of measure, the expanse of water they would normally face is left mysteriously absent. In this sense they are akin to a mathematical object, the intense and repeated focus across these series of box drawings gives an odd quality. They feel a little like a Boltzmann Brain 1, fanciful and perverse, floating free.
Such flights of the imagination seem to spring from drawing, paper is for a child the first place to enact desires, a portal to watch the interior life becomes concrete. Indeed, the particular perspective of the boxes is perpendicular to the sightline of a child crawling, every detail and crevice is investigated with incredulity. However unlike a small child, who’s impulse is to taste their world, these are studies against the olfactory. They intend to vivisection a slice of remembered time, they are distillations; crystalline.
One gets the sense with Michael Page’s work that there is an encoding of information, intuitive rather than algorithmic but based on principles and hidden rules. In the clock drawings comprised of collaged paper fixed to plate steel with magnets, the letter N appears slotted into the compositions. ‘N’ is an algebraic substitute for a hidden value. There is a sense with all the work of the personal and private realm of drawing, an audience of one. This quality is convergent with the tradition of the illuminated manuscript or alchemist, the drawn page being an intersection of the transcendent. Interested in the Antiquarian movement Page relates to the era of science at its most private and personal, the figure of John Leland walking the landscape and making drawings of the standing stones and churches of England echoes in the background of his own personal codex of drawings. The sinewy concourses of the Paroxysmal series evoke parabolic forms from nature, river bends or snakes’ bellies, they are of course also calligraphic and cartographic, like the fishing box drawings their size appears scalable.
Brice Marden said painting’s power is in the simplicity of the fact that “It stays that way, you’re different but it’s the same, you can go back to it.” This seems particularly pertinent with FYSSHYNGE as the drawings contain the potential of their conversion into objects or equipment, but they are presented as-is, precise and quiet. In many ways it is an exhibition about absences, that which is left out gives ballast to what is visible. These are drawings of prosthetics, once ink is put onto paper it has the indelible quality of being persuasively ‘real’, hence the mistrust in oral traditions of the written word. It defies aging. Drawing’s resonance with the mind is seamless like that of words, we are happy to live in its spaces and time without realising we have left our own.
1. Theoretical object proposed under the condition of an infinite timescale, in which particles in the void of space would form any object at random no matter how unlikely, including one hundred billion neurons in a brain.