Andrew McIntosh
I Hope This Transmission Finds You Soon
2 to 30 May 2026
Opening: Saturday 2 May 3 - 8pm
All alone in the long night
Staring up at the moon
I've been looking a long time
What's your name? Am I ever gonna find you?
- Is There Anybody Out There Lord Huron
SCHOOL is please to present I Hope This Transmission Finds You Soon, an exhibition of paintings by leading Scottish landscape painter Andrew McIntosh. The focus for I Hope This Transmission Finds You Soon is a series of red paintings depicting mountains. Within each, circular lights float like celestial entities, disrupting the landscape, like in the 1976 Sci-Fi classic The Man Who Fell to Earth where a still lake explodes with the arrival of Newton (David Bowie) on Earth.
McIntosh’s landscapes - often inspired by the Highlands of Scotland - are disrupted with light, energy sources, caravans depicting historic scenes or artworks, or local shops rerooted in quite unfamiliar and impractical locations for their services. By interjecting otherworldly elements to his landscapes, he subverts traditional notions of vastness and the sublime and removes any notion of place. McIntosh looks on the world with the truthful eyes of the unscathed, with wonderment and excitement at the unparalleled possibilities surrounding us at all times.
In his masterful 1985 novel Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy writes: “The truth about the world … is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning”.
Andrew McIntosh was born in Grantown On Spey in the Highlands of Scotland in 1979. Following studies at Edinburgh’s Telford College 1997-99, he held his first solo exhibition at the Highland Mori museum in 2001. Since then he has exhibited widely across the UK, including at the Carnegie Club at Skibo castle in Sutherland, and the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in London. In 2014 he won the Towry Award for Best in Show at the National Open Art Competition at Somerset House in London, and was shortlisted for the John Moores Painting Prize at the Walker Art Museum in Liverpool, as well as being selected to exhibit in Here Today in London, curated by Artwise. Following his solo exhibition You Were Shit in the 80s at James Freeman Gallery in 2015, his large painting RA! was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 2016, and he was nominated for the Pulse Art Prize in Miami 2016. Collections include Simmons & Simmons; The Ivy; Vanessa Branson (founder of the Marrakech Biennale); and Mr & Mrs Barney Moores (family of John Moores).
Andrew McIntosh is represented by James Freeman Gallery
Two new limited edition prints by Andrew McIntosh will be launched alongside this exhibition. We will also be producing a limited edition book with a poetic response to the exhibition written by Ben Schneider.