240 - PAT ANDREA (The Hague, The Netherlands, 1942).

PAT ANDREA (The Hague, The Netherlands, 1942). Untitled, 1992, from the series "Olympic Suite". Lithograph on Vélin d'Arches paper, 270 grams, copy 220/250. Signed and justified by hand. Size: 63 x 90 cm. The Olympic Suite is made up of fifty lithographs and serigraphs chosen to represent various contemporary artistic trends. It was published to commemorate the first centenary of modern Olympism. The artists chosen work in very diverse movements and styles, from the hyperrealism of Antonio López to the abstraction of Sol Lewitt, including abstract expressionism, the geometrism of Arden Quin, conceptual art, pop art, the new realism of Baldaccini and Rotella, and the new fauvism of Dokoupil, among others. Among the artists represented there are creators of great international renown, widely recognised by the critics. The son of a visual artist and an illustrator, Pat Andrea trained at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in The Hague. Together with the artists Walter Nobbe and Peter Blokhuis, he formed the ABN group, which became known as the New Hague School. In 1976, after his first exhibition in Paris, he travelled to Latin America, a place that notably changed his way of working, where he began to develop the figurative compositions we know, of greater strength and formal tension than his previous works. In 1977 Jean Clair invited him to take part in the exhibition entitled "New Subjectivity", which was held at the Autumn Festival in Paris. From then on he would be known as a representative of this artistic current which draws from the new figuration, second German expressionism and surrealism. Pat developed a body of work in which he captured the horrors and phobias of the war between the male and female sexes, featuring characters who have lost their psychological equilibrium and are torn between tenderness and violence, all through a grotesque expressionism in which synthesised forms and flat colours predominate. Between 1983 and 1989 he combined his stays in Buenos Aires with periods in Europe, specifically in the cities of The Hague and Paris. During the 1990s he exhibited at the Balducci-Daverio Gallery in New York, and in 1998 he was appointed professor at the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he has lived with his family ever since.