Informality is delighted to present a selection of work by British artist, Andrew Lansley. The exhibition shows for the first time a selection of egg tempera paintings and watercolours which were created as a visual record to document the artists’ recent voyage to Antarctica and celebrates the artist as the recipient for the Scott Polar Research Institute’s 2018/19 resident artist.

Andrew Lansley has long had a focus on Antarctica and he was creating polar images long before his expedition to the Southern Ocean with the Royal Navy. The artists’ previous travels had taken him to Norway and Greenland and the experience of Antarctica altogether would prove to be a more powerful experience. Lansley returned from Antarctica with an extensive folio of sketches and ink drawings and over 5,000 photographs, the memory and the environment now documented in a cache of visual material.

Lansley generates work from whichever source is most directly accessible, entailing a variety of material abstractions or works that are directly related to impressions of the landscape, this source of inspiration is as the artist believes, the fabric of nature. The artist considers paint as earth and water, and uses raw pigments with a variety of mediums and chooses the natural medium as an element which connects his work directly to the elemental resource which is part of our environment. Working this way as the artist suggests, allows an initiative within his practice, the medium intuitively can perform as either inductively abstract and at other times is deductively analytical.

Andrew Lansley’s work has been exhibited multiple times throughout the UK, his work has been exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, the Royal West England Academy and the Mall Galleries, London. He has been the recipient of notable prizes including the Bath Society Rostra Prize in 2019, 2014, The Royal Watercolour Society exhibition prize in 2016 and selected as the resident artist for Scott Polar institute in 2018 and 2019. Work has been exhibited in group shows including the Royal Academy of Art’s summer exhibition in 2017, 2016, 2015, the Derwent Art Prize, Royal Society of British artists Sunday Times Watercolour prize and Wells international Contemporary open among others. Work is held in private collections internationally in the UK, Europe and China, selected public collections include Chippenham Museum, Scott Polar Institute and The Royal Navy.