Andrew Shillam - Sculpture, Playing Card and Surrealist Ants

Sculpture, Playing Card and Surrealist Ants
Acrylic on board
27.5cm x 22.5cm
Ref. 53857

Andrew Shillam's "Sculpture, Playing Card and Surrealist Ants" combines modernist formal language with symbolic imagery in a sparsely layered composition. A cubist sculpture rendered in black and white, anchors the work, its fragmented planes suggesting multiple viewpoints simultaneously. Contemporary playing cards depicting king and queen introduce hierarchical symbolism into the geometric abstraction, whilst surrealist ants traverse the composition, introducing organic chaos into constructed order. Shillam's palette and formal vocabulary create visual tension between rational structure and irrational intrusion. The work explores how disparate elements—sculptural form, gaming iconography, and biological presence—negotiate shared pictorial space, suggesting that meaning emerges through unexpected juxtaposition rather than narrative coherence. A sophisticated meditation on modernism's encounter with the surreal.