Andrew Morrow: Serious and ambitious, wildly cheeky and corrosively irreverent

Gary Michael Dault reports in the Globe and Mail that Andrew Morrow’s work is riddled with contradiction. “It is simultaneously both serious and ambitious, wildly cheeky and often corrosively irreverent (two of the small paintings in his current exhibition are called ‘Still Life Painted While Consciously Avoiding the Topic of Vasectomy’ and ‘Some Asshole Blocking My View of the Apocalypse’). He wields his oil pigments with such brio that his work looks both virtuosic and slick. Indeed his tendency to be smartly illustrative is something he says he guards against all the time. ‘There was a time when my work was all about technique,’ he says (and you can still see the painterly bravado everywhere). ‘But I’m getting a lot more self-conscious about that now.’ Basically, he tells me, he’s trying to walk a fine line between all of the opposites that lie in wait for him to the right and to the left of his increasingly bravura practice. In a sense, this is no time for narrative painting on a gigantic scale. But ask Morrow if he cares.” Read more.“Andrew Morrow,” Edward Day Gallery, Toronto. Through Jan. 11.