The images that comprise London, U.K.-based Canadian Shaan Syed’s The Andrew Project document an anonymous public art intervention by the artist. Between 2010 and 2013, Syed fly-posted Toronto, Berlin and London with over one-thousand portrait line drawings of a man, accompanied by the name “Andrew”. With the assistance of friends and acquaintances in those cities, Syed monitored the weather wear, graffiti and public interactions that resulted from the portraits appearing on the cities’ streets. Exploring ideas around urbanism and location; advertising, image and abstraction; absence versus presence; and the personal as it relates to the public, The Andrew Project was called “a melancholic, philosophically ruminating one; a rather beautiful paean to absence” by the U.K. art magazine ArtReview.

Shaan Syed’s practice questions distinctions made between established notions of abstraction and representation as they relate to loss and gain in the painting process. His work has been shown  internationally and is currently on view in a three-person show at the Ana Cristea Gallery in New York until December 7, 2013. He is represented by Birch Contemporary (Toronto) and Galerie Michael Janssen (Berlin).

Images from The Andrew Project were published in a book in November 2013. For more information, visit: www.waterstones.com.