ANDREW SALGADO: GLORY!

BEERS London is pleased to present a new body of work by Andrew Salgado, entitled Glory! For the first time, Salgado ventures from figurative painting to present a series devoted exclusively to abstracted florals.

At once funereal and joyous, these exuberant compositions occupy a space between celebration and mourning, expression and uncertainty. Bursting with colour and vitality, they embrace contradiction: frustration and release, restraint and abandon, beauty and decay. For the artist, the word "glory" is laden with possibility, at once promising and mildly unsettling; its etymology meaning majestic and light, but also heaviness, social weightiness.

Given the turmoil of recent years, as well as Salgado's own increasingly literary approach to his art, this body of work is a response and reaction to his own tendency toward narrative. In recent years, his exhibitions have been accompanied by extensive writing and narrative frameworks, but Glory! purposely turns the opposite direction, pursuing a more immediate language rooted in gesture, sensation, and the visceral possibilities of paint itself.

At the heart of this body of work is a search for freedom. During the process of creation, Salgado has found himself moving further away from quote-unquote "flower paintings" to something closer to pure idea: automatic writing or a communion between concept, process, and execution. These are not flowers in any conventional sense, but dreamlike expressions hovering somewhere between representational recognition and pure abstraction. The flower is less a subject matter than a catalyst, allowing the artist access to a sense of abstraction that he has increasingly hinted at for years.

Though florals themselves arrive laden with centuries of symbolism, evoking beauty, mortality, devotion, abundance, and transience. Salgado embraces this history while resisting singular interpretation.

Ultimately, these paintings are less about "flowers" than they are about possibility.
Rather than marking a departure, they suggest Salgado’s evolution as an artist, revealing another facet of a practice devoted to exploration, one driven by intuition, confidence, and a willingness to explore every dimension of his own creative identity. If there is a defining gesture here, it is not one of abandonment, but of curiosity: the confidence to embrace change while continuing to pursue the questions that have always underscored the work.

ANDREW SALGADO (b. 1982, Regina, Canada) graduated with an MA in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art in 2009, and is regarded as one of the United Kingdom’s leading figurative painters. He has exhibited worldwide, with solo exhibitions in London, New York, Tokyo, Miami, Toronto, Cape Town, Sydney, and throughout Europe.

Solo exhibitions include: Self-Portrait as a Stack of Books, BEERS London, London (2025); Tomorrow I'll Be Perfect, presented by BEERS London, Saatchi Gallery, London (2023); CAN Art Fair, Ibiza, Spain (2023); Good Things, Piermarq*, Sydney, Australia (2023); The Lotus Eaters, Maki, Tokyo, Japan (2022);  A Never-Setting Sun, BEERS London (2022); Strange Weather, BEERS London (2020); Paperbag Prince, Untitled Art Fair, Miami (2019); Blue Rainbow, Angell Gallery, Toronto, Canada (2018); Dirty Linen/The Nihilist’s Alphabet, Christopher Moller Gallery, Cape Town, SA (2018); A Room with a View of the Ocean, Lauba, Zagreb, Croatia (2017), TEN, Canadian High Commission, London (2016) and; The Snake, BEERS London (2016).

Group exhibitions include: I Love LA, albertz benda gallery, Los Angeles (2026); Untitled Art Fair, PIERMARQ Gallery, Miami (2025); Flowers: Flora in Contemporary Art & Culture, Saatchi Gallery, London (2025); Fierce Form, Art Megastar, Los Angeles (2024); 13-A-Dozen, Galleri Sanberg, Odense, Denmark (2023); Showstopper, Saatchi Gallery, London (2022); Come Out & Play, BEERS London (2022); PINK, Piermarq*, Sydney, Australia (2022); paper. , BEERS London (2022); Paperwork’s Vol. II, NBB Gallery, Berlin, Germany (2021); John Wolf presents … Interconnected, Los Angeles (2021); Zona Maco Art Fair, BEERS London, Mexico City (2019); Berlin Calling, Galerie Kornfeld, Berlin, Germany (2018); Summer Salon, BEERS London (2018) and; The Therapist’s Office, 1969 Gallery, New York (2018).

In 2017, Salgado was the youngest artist ever to receive a survey exhibition at The Canadian High Commission in London. He has received extensive press both online and in print, and he frequently donates to charities and is a frequent advocate for LGBT causes. His works have successfully entered the secondary market with prices frequently doubling their estimates, including a piece at Phillips New York selling for five times its estimate in June 2021.

His works have been collected extensively, including The Oketa Collection, The Royal Bank of Canada Collection, The Masahiro Maki Collection, Government of Canada, The Jordanian Royal Family, Simmons & Simmons, the Esquinazi Collection, Edwin Oostmeier Collection, and more.

He lives and works between London, England and New Brunswick, Canada.