Andrew Reach Works in the Realm of Digital Media
(Born 1961 Miami Beach) Andrew Reach is an abstract artist working in the realm of digital media. He received a degree in Architecture from Pratt Institute in New York and had a successful 20 year career as an architect, practicing in New York City, Los Angeles and Miami. His last building as project architect with HOK Architects was the Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum at Florida International University in Miami. In 2003, a spine disease resulted in a spinal fusion of most of his spine and in the fall of 2004, due to complications, at the commencement of construction of the Frost Art Museum, he would undergo a lifesaving surgery marking an end and a new beginning; reinvention from architect to visual artist.
He re-channeled his restless creative spirit as an artist working in digital media. Digital media is an accessible alternative platform for him in creating art. Living with chronic debilitating pain, each work of art he creates is a techno-meditation of multiple aspects; technology, intellect and imagination. When these elements come together, he feels an indescribable sense of wellbeing. In my art making, he is lost in a place where pain does not live.
What he strives to express in his art is the opposite of pain; of triumph. His quest is to reach optical joyfulness and impart this joy to the viewer. He may not be able to have unbridled energy and movement in his physical body but he can through artwork that speaks to freedom of spirit.
His vehicle to express this is through geometry and color. His connection with geometry started at a young age. The tropical colors and shapes around him in the physical environment resonated with him, particularly the shapes of art deco buildings in Miami Beach where he grew up. It became clear to him by the time he was a teenager that his calling would be to become an architect where he could put geometry into practice.
And so it would come to pass that geometry and color would be his escape hatch in his artistic journey and in his recent work tapping into the architect that never left him, He has found that creating 3d structures provides him with further experiments in integrating color and geometry in new ways in a process he calls 3D Derivatives. The idea of an artist being derivative often has a negative connotation, as being imitative of another artist but he is using this word in a different context; that of something that is derived from a source, in this case the source being a 3d model. In this process, high resolution renders of compelling views of 3D geometric structures are exported and printed on rigid substrates and cut out on a cnc router.
His work has been exhibited in the United States in solo and group exhibitions including a solo exhibition at the Frost Art Museum. His work is in private, corporate and institutional collections, among them the Permanent Collection of the Frost Art Museum, University Hospitals Art Collection, Summa Health Healing Arts Collection and the Cleveland Clinic Art Collection. His work in public art includes a permanent installation at the LGBT Community Center of Greater Cleveland and most recently he was commissioned by the Cleveland Public Library in partnership with Land Studio to create “QUADRATALUX’, a 10 x 30 foot art wall for one of its branches as part of CPL’s “SEE ALSO” public art initiative.
