Locating himself ‘between Francis Bacon and Balthus’, the Dutch artist Pat Andrea has developed a figurative painting style depicting an ambiguous and murky universe with its origins in a demi-monde somewhere between surrealism and figurative art sometimes known as the new subjectivity.

Andrea grew up in Den Haag (The Hague) in an artistic family; his father was the painter Kees Andrea and his mother the illustrator Metty Naezer. From 1960 to 1965 he studied at the Royal Academy of Art in Den Haag, where he was a student of the painter Co Westerik. Along with Peter Blokhuis and Walter Nobbe he founded the ABN Group (based on their initials), which came to be associated with the Nieuwe Haagse School of architecture, a style characterised by straight lines and cubist shapes.

In 1964 Andrea won the Jacob Maris Prize for drawing, and in 1971 received the Koninklijke Prijs voor Vrije Schilderkunst (Royal Prize for Painting). In 1977 he was invited by Jean Clair (the nom de plume of Gérard Régnier, the art historian who was for many years the director of the Picasso Museum in Paris) to participate in the exhibition La Nouvelle Subjectivité in the Paris Fall Festival, along with Jim Dine, David Hockney, R. B. Kitaj, Raymond Mason and Olivier O. Olivier.

During the early 1980s he travelled to Latin America and settled in Buenos Aires, where he remained for several years. He currently lives and works in Paris, where he teaches at the École des Beaux-Arts. In 2002 he was elected a corresponding member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts of the Institut de France. His most recent exhibition, entitled Crosswalk, was shown at the Strouk Gallery in Paris in the spring of 2023.

We are very grateful to our Russian friend Yuri for suggesting the inclusion of this artist, and for supplying most of the images.