Saints and Sinners
Stephen Andrews
excerpts from Apostles and Petite Mort
June 27 - August 16, 2025
Opening Reception Friday June 27, 7-10pm
Paul Petro Contemporary Art is pleased to present our Pride programming, with Stephen Andrews Saints and Sinners, comprised of works from The Apostles (1998), Francisco De la Barra Cuerpos y Espejos / Bodies and Mirrors, with new ink washes, and Paul P. Scattered Pictures, a collection-based exhibition of mostly early work.
From Stephen Andrews:
Saints and Sinners
"In the history of art there are many examples of artists flaunting convention by selecting models from the lower echelons of Society. Goya and Courbet did it to ‘educate and entertain’ the viewer. Earlier Caravaggio was notorious for casting sinners as Saints, much to the chagrin of the church.
"Following in that grand tradition, I selected models from the physique magazines of the 1950’s and 60’s and recast them as the Apostles. Suffice it to say that their faces were not the subjects of the source photographs.
"Joy had been in such short supply through the nineties so it was fun coupling the sacred with the profane to playfully explore the nature of the ecstatic."
Stephen Andrews
June 23, 2025
STEPHEN ANDREWS was born in 1956 in Sarnia, Ontario, Canada. His work deals with memory, identity, and technology, and their representations in various media including photography, drawing, animation, painting and ceramics. Over the last twenty-five years he has exhibited his work across Canada, the U.S., Brazil, Scotland, France, Italy and Japan, including POV, a fifteen-year survey at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2015 (with catalogue) and Aftermath, with drawings focused on the Iraq War, at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in 2018 (with catalogue).
Andrews is represented in collections including the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Belkin Art Gallery (Vancouver, BC), the Agnes Etherington Art Centre (Kingston, ON), the Art Gallery of Hamilton, the Tom Thomson Art Gallery (Owen Sound, ON), the Schwartz Collection, Harvard University, and corporate art collections including Torys (Toronto), Osler, Hoskin and Harcourt (Toronto), the Royal Bank of Canada, National Bank of Canada, TD Canada Trust and the Bank of Montreal.
Andrews is a recipient of the Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts (2019).