Sperone Westwater is pleased to present "Andrew Sendor: InstaCOVID Drawings," an online exhibition featuring a series of new drawings made in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

With more time spent at home, people are scrolling through their devices more than ever as we react to the universal phenomenon that is social distancing. Social media has been an important counterbalance to this isolation. Sendor begins with digital photos—frequently glanced over in Instagram's endless feed— and transforms them into intimate drawings. In meditative, repetitive motion, he slowly accumulates graphite on the page, building painstaking detail. In this new series, each drawing becomes an amalgamation of fact and fiction, human and digital.

Sendor explains: 

"Since March 24th, 2020, I have been developing a new series of drawings derived from Instagram-based content. These drawings are designed to act as time capsules, as portraits, and as individual vignettes that allude to a larger narrative.

As a significant percentage of society has been self-quarantined due to the COVID-19 global pandemic, folks are sharing lived experience in real-time, which invites a reappraisal of the perceived meaning of self-isolation. Witnessing this highly unsettling and tragic global pandemic is unlike anything I have ever experienced. As a way of processing the barrage of information and of capturing certain aspects of what we are collectively experiencing, I was compelled to document the images we have shared during our isolation.

In translating a digital image to an analog one with pencils on paper, there lies a dialogue between the nuances of handmade drawing and digital glitches. Each composition has visual fractures, repetitive slices of imagery, and in some instances, drifting marks or icons, all of which reflect the present, perpetual state of flux in which images are read and shared. Whereas printed photos were considered static documents, digital images disseminated in virtual space have more of a flow than a trace."

Born in 1977, Andrew Sendor lives and works in New York. He received his BFA from Pratt Institute in 2000. Sendor’s work is characterized by a meticulous draftsmanship that illuminates his ongoing engagement with the interrelation of photorealism and invented narrative structures. His first solo at Sperone Westwater took place in 2013 and was followed by shows in 2015 and 2017. An installation of his paintings is currently on view in the exhibition "Blue" at the Nassau County Museum of Art, re-opening to the public on Wednesday, July 8th. In 2019, his work was the subject of the two-person exhibition “Micro-Macro: Andrew Sendor and Ali Banisadr” at MOCA Jacksonville. In 2015, MSU Broad Art Museum presented “Andrew Sendor: Paintings, Drawings and a Film.” His works have been included in numerous museum exhibitions, including the Funen Art Museum, Odense, Denmark; Hudson Valley MOCA, Peekskill, NY; Knoxville Museum of Art, Knoxville, TN; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO; and the ARKEN Museum of Art, Ishøj, Denmark. Private and public collections owning his work include MSU Broad Art Museum; The Morgan Library & Museum, New York; the Rubell Collection, Miami; and Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville.

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