Between Concrete and Wood: Andrew Mackenzie

2 - 30 March 2024

&Gallery is delighted to welcome Andrew Mackenzie back for his third solo exhibition, Between Concrete and Wood.

The exhibition brings together new paintings and drawings focusing on two significant modernist buildings in the Scottish Borders, coupled with responses to an area of woodland near the artist’s home. The paintings were made over a period of a year, through a long process of applying and removing paint.
House 2, Oil on panel, 55 x 110 cm

Andrew became fascinated by High Sunderland, Benet Klein and Peter Womersley when he moved to the area in 2007. In early 2023, with kind permission of the owners, he visited High Sunderland, spending a day drawing and photographing. The series of paintings which developed from this day simply celebrate the beauty of this structure and its balanced relationship with the surrounding landscape. Mackenzie adapted elements of the surroundings, especially trees, but the depictions of the forms and proportions of the house are closely observed. The paintings grew over a long period, beginning with charcoal tonal studies on paper, and then many months of applying and removing layers of subjective colour and marks, until they felt right.
- Andrew Mackenzie
  House 5
  Oil on panel
  12 x 24 cm
  
  £ 1,600.00
- Andrew Mackenzie, Car Port 1
Stadium 1, Orange, oil on panel, 21.5 x 37 cm

The architectural paintings based on Bernat Klein’s house and the nationally important Netherdale Stadium in Galashiels were both designed by the British architect Peter Womersley in the 50’s and 60’s. The resulting works celebrate the stunning beauty of these structures and their subtle relationships with the landscape, while also gently questioning the legacies of modernism.
- Andrew Mackenzie
  Quarry 6
  Oil on panel
  30 x 60 cm
  
  £ 4,400.00
- Andrew Mackenzie
  Waste Land
  Oil on panel
  30 x 60 cm
  
  £ 4,400.00
Fire Exit (detail), oil on panel, 60 x 120 cm

Alongside these are a series of paintings showing aspects of an area of clear-fell in much-loved woodland very near Andrew’s home, partially felled by Storm Arwen in 2021 and recently cleared and replanted. The paintings give painstaking attention to this place, showing layered imagined future trees, protective tree-tubes, a log-pile, a viewing platform and a fire-exit (lifted from a back street in his local town and placed in the woodland), commenting on the fundamental importance of everyday life cycles occurring under our noses. They prompt questions around human entanglement with the landscape; whether a revered modernist classic building, a cleared area of woodland, or a back street fire-exit.
- Andrew Mackenzie
  Fire Exit
  Oil on panel
  60 x 120 cm
  
  £ 7,900.00
- Andrew Mackenzie
  Viewing Platform
  Oil on panel
  75 x 150 cm
  
  £ 9,900.00
Phantom Limb, charcoal, soft pastel and gouache on paper, Framed: 46 x 64 cm

Phantom Limb is based on a place up the hill from where Mackenzie lives, which has a small area of tree planting - using tree tubes on the edge of a moor. The pink lines hover spookily somewhere between fencing, snow poles and tree tubes, edges and demarcation of boundaries overlapping with the positivity of planting. The drawing is also simply a response to a place, with attention to space, placement of objects, depth and flatness, weather, colour, and the joy of the season. Mackenzie loves how winter allows colour and form to be simplified and stripped right back, allowing those pops of pink to resonate.
- Andrew Mackenzie
  Quarry Drawing 1
  Charcoal and pastel on fabriano
  
  36 x 76 cm
  Framed: 46 x 82 cm
  
  £ 2,400.00
- Andrew Mackenzie
  Tennis Court
  Charcoal and soft pastel on paper
  27 x 54 cm
  Framed: 37 x 64 cm
  
  £ 2,000.00