Michael Glover reviews Michael Andrews: Earth, Air, Water at Gagosian Gallery, London, on view through March 25, 2017.

Writing about Andrews’ painting Thames Painting: The Estuary (1994–95), Glover asks: “What exactly is the painting’s vantage point? High, certainly, almost sea-gull high perhaps. We teeter there, looking down, across, and side to side, never quite getting a grip. The painting itself looks as if it has been conjured into being from the mucky stuff of the estuary itself: gritty, slick, shiftily sliding. We almost find ourselves tumbling headlong into the notion that this is an abstract painting. But no. Tiny figures on the shoreline – fishermen with their bowing rods – pinion it to the real.”