About the Artist
Andrew Raftery is an artist specializing in fictional and autobiographical narratives of contemporary American life. Andrew loves prints for their ubiquitous role in our world: on wallpaper, ceramics, textiles, and other functional objects, such as bandboxes. He welcomes the challenge of using seemingly antiquated techniques such as engraving to treat contemporary subject matter. Andrew’s studio practice is research based, branching out into collaborations with museums and scholars. He is Professor of Printmaking at Rhode Island School of Design and is represented by Ryan Lee Gallery in New York. His home and studio are in Providence, Rhode Island.
Vues d’Italie by Dufour – Scene I and II in Baltimore Drinking Room
The rooms in this house-turned-museum are filled daily with the modern clothes, technology, and behaviors of the visitors and staff who walk these halls. Artist Andrew Raftery explores this collision of old and new, often adding intentional glimpses of museum life to his recreations of the scenes he observes, which he calls “a pictorial fiction.” In 2021 Raftery first visited Winterthur and, over many visits, spent hours sketching and “reverse engineering” the Vues d’Italie wallpaper in this room. He decided to make sketches “that showed how I see the room, not what it looks like.”
Visit the Transformations exhibit in the Winterthur Galleries from June 8, 2024 – January 5, 2025 to see the Bandbox Project by Andrew Raftery and a collective of printmakers.