Randy Anderson

This exhibition of paintings “by” Randy Anderson are paintings “of” Randy Anderson. These paintings, however, do not contain a portrait of the artist but only the artist's signature.

Randy Anderson is best-known for his wallpaper pieces that have been exhibited extensively over the past two years, most notably in Vancouver, at the 1984 Warehouse Show, at the Western Front in 1985 and at the Surrey Art Gallery in Art about Issues in1986. The wallpaper, designed and silk-screened by Anderson, was made up of commodity items such as cars, electric kettles, televisions, toilets and telephones. Brightly coloured, this wallpaper had the same seductive quality that these items have within a consumer society and yet the consumption of this wallpaper as an object was denied as it was glued directly to the gallery wall.

In this exhibition of paintings Anderson continues to deny the consumption of the art object, yet, now through the creation of the object. The traditional picture/subject matter of the painting is absent and only his signature appears on the surface. Visually sparse, the works focus on the isolation of the authoritative elements in a work of art: the concept of the "original," the artist's signature which denotes an "original," and the consumption of the "original" as a commodity.