Drew Englander (b.1985 in Ventura, CA) is a painter living and working in Brooklyn, NY.
His current body of work uses bold colors, distorted perspectives, and hard-edged chiaroscuro to depict an intimate world of clean maximalism that is at once skewed, personal, and familiar. His style is influenced by the things he engages with on a daily basis such as digital technology, sports and entertainment, virtual reality, and art history. The work speaks to the confounding nature of solitude within a highly interconnected world, and the necessity of adapting and responding to environmental and psychological changes.
Drew composes scenes by initially doing small observational drawings on an iPad with his finger. Building the composition like an interlocking puzzle in an intuitive way, and working with gestural marks gives the images a messy yet deliberate fluidity that captures the shifting nature of objects and spaces. It is for this reason that drawing is essential to Drew’s practice, and is the genesis of every painting. Making the painting itself is an exercise in giving this perspective a believable physical presence, and unifying the loose elements.