There are moments when I feel the weight of a memory, the dull ache of something half-remembered and half-forgotten. A echo of the past that prompts me to paint until I come to understand what I am feeling.

-Andrew Ragland

In his depiction of the human form, Andrew Ragland [451.RED] blurs the boundaries of classical figuration and modern abstraction. Built up through layers, the images that take shape are an amalgam of traditional analog techniques adapted and applied to an ever-evolving digital medium.

Born in 1978 in Madras, India, and then emigrating to the US. He attended the University of Notre Dame from 1996 to 2001 graduating with a degree in Psychology. His undergraduate studies focused his interest on memory formation and consolidation, exploring how the unconscious mind cannibalizes and collages what is experienced by the conscious mind during its waking hours, and then recombining both the real and the imagined into a single, unified memory. The concept of the false memory and its associated phantom imagery would eventually become a central theme to his work.

In 2003, he left a graduate MFA film program, to pursue an independent study of figure drawing at the American Animation Guild under Karl Gnass and later studied figure drawing and painting at the California Art Institute under Glen Orbik until 2015.

A member of the nascent web3 NFT community, a loose group of digital artists who came to prominence in the post-covid era, his work has contributed to the converstation of contemporary figurative painting in the web3 space. While pushing the boundaries, his work reveals a deep awareness, both intellectual and sensory, of how the body has been represented over time and across cultures — from ancient Hindu sculpture, to Renaissance drawing and painting, to the work of modern artists such as Justin Mortimer, Phil Hale, Francis Bacon, and Peter Doig.

His work is often composed of triptych figures that are suspended in time and coded between multiple layers of a fractured colorfield. His interventions bear the echoes of the temporal exploration of form in Matisse’s Bathers by the River (1909-17), the unwavering gaze of the subject to viewer in Yoshitomo Nara’s I Want to See The Bright Lights Tonight (2017), and the precise use of color and geometry in Euan Uglow’s Striding Figure (1975), as he incorporates imagery of faces and bodies culled and collaged from the visual archives of the internet; while at the same time creating and contributing a tranche of new source material for its next iteration on the blockchain.