Andre René Epps Jr.

Born

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

Education

Columbia College Chicago — studied theatre, 2010–2013. No degree awarded.

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. But the faces stay closed, on purpose. What you get is posture, costume, the weight of a look, and the colour that was already in the room. You end up standing in front of someone who will not tell you what they are, which is the condition the paintings are about. The visible seams are where two readings meet, not an opening. 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.