Dutch painter and sculptor Pat Andrea was born in 1942 in The Hague into a family of artists and studied at the Royal Academy of Art. He founded the ABN group, known as the New Hague School, and presented his first solo exhibition in 1965. He was a professor at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1998 to 2005.

His unrealistic worlds populated by disturbing female and sexual figures cannot leave you indifferent. A unique and daring work depicting young women undergoing strange metamorphoses, or featured in highly fantastical scenes. Behind the bright colors, ingenuous collages, and flowing hair of Pat Andrea's woman-children lie stories both big and small, ranging from violence to tenderness, drama to humor.

Behind closed doors, women scream, hit, and torture. Alternately terrified or terrifying, happy or melancholic, chaste or seductive, shameful or cruel, Pat Andrea's eroticized teenage girls are provocative. A quiet violence emanates from the artist's imagination. The disturbing scenes, mixed with humor and pastel colors, cover the tensions with a disguised irony. In Pat Andrea's world, the sweetness of childhood, the violence of feelings, and the eroticism of a long pair of bare legs collide. It is a world of confusing contrasts that gives rise to a new and poetic reality.

Pat Andrea now lives and works between Buenos Aires, Paris, and The Hague. As he explains, artists “are there to paint a world we cannot see, the world of ideas, the world of dreams, things that do not exist. That is our task.”

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"What I want is to capture images that attempt to rival those of painters I admire, such as the Flemish Primitives like Van Eyck and Van der Weyden, or Goya. Very early on, I painted characters caught up in minor catastrophes in space. These were people who lost their balance, who fell or dropped something, who were attacked by a dog, who fled in fear. What interests me and what I seek to capture on canvas or paper is always the moment when a situation changes, is reversed, the instant when something tips over and causes a new state of affairs and beings. I need to use ancient models to produce resolutely modern images." Pat Andrea