ANDRE STITT – ESTATELESS
12/06/26 – 25/07/26
Preview: 12th June , 7pm
Exhibition open Wednesday – Saturday 11am –5pm
Cosmic utopias, spectral intervention, eternal war, and secular transcendence frame the conceptual terrain of Andre Stitt’s work.
The works selected for this exhibition explore communal habitation and dissolution, often relating to trauma and conflict, with art positioned as a redemptive proposition. The three galleries and café at the new Elysium art space are used to conflate temporal shifts and function as a form of reportage, responding to experiences where the personal becomes political. Each gallery space unfolds as a thematic progression, drawing upon the materiality of the built environment and its abstract displacement through painting, where forms are remembered and reimagined as part of a parallel universe.
Mid-century modernist interiors appear as disembodied remnants of a drone strike; compulsive monuments allude to a nostalgia of repression; locations are redacted within GPS systems; and a pandemic reconfigures human transgression. References emerge to days of resistance, inhaling the spore, altered inheritance and chemical liaison, visionary ordinance on the other side of arrival—beyond and after something—at the love motel.
Stitt employs allusions to architecture—sites of habitation such as housing estates, military installations, and the occupation and civilianisation of contested spaces—to suggest the instability of human-historical time. The current work is therefore concerned with notions of utopian dysfunction: architecture as a mechanism of power-based indoctrination, and a teleological condition in which the creation of new worlds produces doctrines of endless and intractable conflict.
More broadly, his practice engages with the materiality of the human environment and its abstraction through painting, operating as a memory of forms reimagined within a parallel universe. The ambition is to produce work that generates a sense of recognition counterbalanced by timelessness—paintings that seem to arrive from another time and place, forming a potential dissident space where historical eras collapse into one another.
Paint is utilised as a synthetic transmitter of experience, reflecting the historical uncertainty of time and place while proposing contemporary genre painting as a transformative medium with redemptive potential. In this sense, Stitt’s painting occupies a position that is neither static nor fixed, but part of a network of provocation that may be understood as ambiguous or ‘atemporal’ abstraction.
André Stitt (b. 1958, Belfast, Northern Ireland) is an artist whose practice spans performance, installation, and painting. He studied at Ulster Polytechnic and Belfast College of Art & Design (1976–1980), developing his work during the height of the Troubles—a context that continues to inform his exploration of trauma, conflict, and art as a redemptive force.
From 1980 to 1999, Stitt lived in London while exhibiting and performing internationally, establishing a reputation for politically charged, interdisciplinary work. In 1999, he moved to Wales to join Cardiff School of Art & Design, where he later became Professor of Performance & Interdisciplinary Art and Programme Leader for the MFA. He is currently Emeritus Professor of Fine Art at Cardiff Metropolitan University.
Between 1976 and 2013, Stitt worked primarily in performance and interdisciplinary practices, presenting work at major international venues including MoMA PS1 and the Venice Biennale. Since 2013, his focus has shifted toward painting as an expanded and speculative field, retaining his engagement with social, political, and historical conditions.
His work has been exhibited widely, including at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, and the National Museum of Wales, and he is a regular contributor to the National Eisteddfod of Wales.
Selected solo exhibitions include presentations in New York, Sydney, Berlin, Auckland, Belfast, and across the UK. Stitt also founded and directed trace: Installaction Artspace in Cardiff (2000–2010), initiating an influential programme of international performance and installation practices, alongside curatorial projects across Europe, Asia, and Australia.
Rooted in his upbringing in Belfast, Stitt’s work reflects on histories of violence, identity, and power. His practice—shifting from performance to painting—remains grounded in an expanded, interdisciplinary approach that positions art as a site of transformation, resistance, and possibility.