TAWA at 45
The Exhibition
Andrew Werth
Sierpinski Squared #3
acrylic on canvas, 2019; 30″h x 30″w;
Andrew Werth (www.andrewwerth.com) has been exhibiting his philosophically-inspired “organized organic abstraction” paintings at galleries throughout the New Jersey/New York/Pennsylvania area since 2005. The Monmouth Museum (Lincroft) awarded Werth a solo exhibition in 2016 as part of their New Jersey Emerging Artists series. In 2021, The Center for Contemporary Art (Bedminster) hosted Organic Abstractions, a solo show featuring more than 30 of Werth’s paintings. He has exhibited at Art Fair 14C (Jersey City) three times (including October 2023). Werth has been included many times in the Ellarslie Open and in TAWA exhibitions at the Trenton City Museum. He exhibited at Artists’ Gallery in Lambertville from 2009-2015. Additional highlights include various group shows in New York City, Philadelphia, Chicago, West Windsor, and Trenton. Although his formal degrees are from Carnegie Mellon University in computer engineering and information networking, he self-directed an arts education that drew from many of the arts institutions in New York City, including the School of Visual Arts, The New School, and the Art Students League.
“I have long been interested in the mind: consciousness, perception, thinking, psychology, and the self. My ongoing study of these and related subjects informs much of my abstract painting. The titles of my paintings are clues to concepts that I find fascinating in the philosophy and science of mind. One idea I’ve found particularly intriguing is the notion of embodiment: that how we make sense of the world is directly shaped by the physical nature of our bodies. For example, the colors we see are due to the pigmentation in our eyes as well as the neural structure of our brain. We generally think of vision as being like photography, where an entire image is presented to us at once. However, vision might be better compared—surprisingly—to touch since it is only through the continuous probing and movement of our eyes that we are able to construct the world around us. Notions of embodiment, metaphor, and mental ‘strange loops’ are recurrent themes in my work. My paintings are built up through a slow, deliberate process that consists of thousands of individual brushstrokes applied one at a time. The markings (derived from the mazes I drew as a child) provide a structure in which to explore perceptual effects and the interaction of color. I design interactions between the underpainting and the mark-making and between foreground and background at multiple levels of abstraction. I strive to create paintings where the viewer will want to keep looking, from near and afar, from different angles and in different lighting, always finding something new to stimulate the eye and the mind.