ANDREW SALGADO: GLORY!
BEERS London is pleased to present a new body of work by Andrew Salgado in his most recent solo exhibition - Glory! For the first time, Salgado turns away from the portrait and figure that have defined his work for more than a decade, presenting a series devoted exclusively to flowers.
At once funereal and joyous, these exuberant compositions occupy a space between celebration and mourning, glory and uncertainty. Bursting with colour and vitality, they embrace contradiction: frustration and release, restraint and abandon, beauty and decay.
These paintings emerged from Salgado's increasingly literary approach to painting. In recent years, his exhibitions have been accompanied by extensive writing and narrative frameworks. Here, he moves in the opposite direction, pursuing a more immediate language rooted in gesture, sensation, and the emotional possibilities of paint itself.
At the heart of this body of work is a search for freedom. Where the figure can become burdened by assumptions of psychology, identity, and narrative, the flower offers something closer to pure idea. These are not flowers in any conventional sense, but dreamlike notions of the floral that hover between recognition and abstraction. The flower becomes less a subject than a catalyst, allowing both artist and viewer greater freedom of interpretation.
Flowers arrive laden with centuries of symbolism, evoking beauty, mortality, devotion, abundance, and transience. Salgado embraces this history while resisting singular interpretation. Colour, gesture, and painterly incident become the primary vehicles through which meaning emerges.
Ultimately, these paintings are less about flowers than they are about possibility. Rooted in play, experimentation, and liberation, they expand Salgado's longstanding interest in emotional intensity while allowing painting itself to take centre stage. Rather than marking a departure, they reveal another facet of an evolving practice—one driven by intuition, uncertainty, and a willingness to explore new dimensions of the artist's 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 animated 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.
