Andre René Epps Jr.

Born

Chicago, Illinois, 1991. Lives and works in Atlanta, Georgia.

Education

Columbia College Chicago — Theatre.

Working musician.

Self-taught as a painter.

Bodies of Work

Group Exhibitions

Press

Artist Statement

Everything They Didn't Tell Me began with a title that arrived before the paintings — a phrase for what nobody had passed down. The series is ten paintings in four acts: Micro, Collision, Macro, Wisdom. They move from the interior — psychological, personal — outward to the systemic: labor, environment, exploitation, what a culture does to the people it needs.

I came to painting from theatre, which I studied at Columbia College Chicago, and from years of working as a musician. I am self-taught as a painter, and I still build a picture like a scene: the face as a mask that slips, the body caught in a moment of revelation. I learned to see by drawing what was around me, long before I had words for it. I work in acrylic and oil stick on yellow-ochre-toned canvas, building portraits where memory presses against the systems that shaped it. The series moves in four acts because that's how I learned a story holds.

These are think pieces. They're built to make somebody ask whether what they know is actually true. I wasn't prepared for this world — I was not. Black men often aren't; the ones who could have taught us weren't there, and the ones who were gave us everything they knew, which wasn't enough. So I went and found it. The work hands it back, as wisdom rather than comfort.