Love Andrew Nicholls: Drawn Works 1998-2008

Publisher • Andrew Nicholls and Stock
Year • 2009
Pages • 120
ISBN • 978-0-9806186-0-0

Published in 2009, Love Andrew Nicholls is a limited edition monogram documenting the first decade of Nicholls’ practice. The title references Nicholls’ third solo exhibition, at Perth’s Verge Gallery in 2001, which comprised the first body of work he had produced that engaged explicitly with the sentimental — his overriding conceptual interest since that point — and it prefigured the other major themes he would go on to explore.

The ‘Love Andrew Nicholls’ exhibition works were intended to foster a loving relationship with the viewer — to encourage access and engagement. More significantly, however, ‘Love Andrew Nicholls’ was Nicholls’ first conscious use of appropriation as political strategy. Gay subjectivity has historically been viewed as an artificial, self-indulgent imitation of ‘authentic’ normative heterosexuality. His ethical response to this legacy has been to flaunt appropriation — practically everything that he draws is stolen from other sources. The various texts referenced in the ‘Love Andrew Nicholls’ exhibition (blue and white china design, Victorian illustration, historical artworks, pop song lyrics, imagery of celebrities and so on) have continued to inform his practice since then.

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About Andrew Nicholls:

Andrew Nicholls is an Australian/British artist, writer, and curator whose practice engages with the sentimental, camp, and other historically-marginalised aesthetics, and traces the historical recurrence of particular aesthetic motifs. He is especially concerned with periods of cultural transition during which Western civilisation’s stoic aspirations were undone by base desires, fears or compulsions, and with 18th century Britain's fascination with, and paranoia of, other cultures and 'othered' identities.

While primarily drawing-based, his practice also incorporates ceramics, photography, installation, performance, and filmmaking. He particularly draws inspiration from heritage sites and museum collections, and has coordinated and participated in residencies at locations including Greenough Hamlet (Australia’s third-most-significant heritage site), Spode China (at that time the UK’s longest-running ceramics factory still based in its original location), Midland Railway Workshops (the southern hemisphere’s most intact remaining Edwardian industrial site), the Freud Museum London (family home of the founder of psychoanalysis), and the Royal Pavilion, Brighton (George IV's seaside pleasure palace). In 2015 he was allowed exclusive access to photograph Donatello's David, by the Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence, as part of a body of work investigating aesthetic legacies of the Grand Tour, currently in production via a Fellowship from the Western Australian Government. In 2017 he was the first Western Australian artist to undertake an ArtSource residency with Residency Unlimited, in Brooklyn, USA. 

Nicholls has exhibited across Australia, Southeast Asia, Italy and the United Kingdom, including solo exhibitions in Perth, Canberra and Sydney, Australia, and Plymouth, England. He has been the recipient of two Creative Development Fellowships from the Western Australian Government, and undertaken commissions for several organisations in Australia and the United States, most recently a $250,000 ceiling mural for the City of Perth Library, and a major drawing commission for the Artbank collection. 

Nicholls has curated projects for organisations including the Art Gallery of Western Australia, the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, and Object Galleries Sydney, and has written for most of Australia’s major national arts publications. His work is represented in collections including Artbank, the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Central Institute of Technology, Curtin University (50th anniversary commissioned artwork and commemorative products), Edith Cowan University (with Sandra Black), Murdoch University, the Kedumba Collection of Australian Drawings, and the City of Perth. He shows with Turner Galleries, Perth.