Andrew Sim: Painting the Tender Mythologies of Queer Fantasy

15/02/2024

Writer: John Tain

Andrew Sim (b. 1987, Scotland) is a queer visual artist based in New York, whose emotionally charged pastel paintings weave together autobiographical memory, mythology, and the dreamlike symbolism of contemporary queer life. With a distinctive visual lexicon populated by hairless werewolves, rainbow forests, flying horses, and hybrid creatures, Sim constructs a world that is at once deeply personal and archetypal—intimate yet mythic.

Educated at the University of Dundee’s Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, Sim initially trained in animation before transitioning fully into painting. His practice has always engaged the fantastical as a form of radical self-invention. Through soft, radiant hues and a childlike sense of wonder, his compositions evoke what he has described as "a kind of queer cosmology"—a world where tenderness, vulnerability, and transformation are not only permitted but celebrated.

Sim’s imagery resists realism in favor of allegory. The creatures that populate his work are not merely invented beings, but emotional avatars: the hairless werewolf, for example, becomes a figure of otherness, bareness, and emotional exposure. Animals are often depicted nurturing, dancing, crying, or nesting—expressing states of care and becoming. His iconography includes Christmas trees, suns and moons, clowns, floral canopies, and rainbow pathways—all recurring motifs that carry both personal and cultural resonance. These are symbols of celebration and melancholy, joy and longing.

In his 2024 solo exhibition “Two Pink Birds with a Gold Nest” at Anton Kern Gallery in New York, Sim presented twelve large-scale pastel works that expanded his narrative universe. The show centered on the motif of two birds nesting together, surrounded by fantastical environments, including a “monkey puzzle tree” and a horse with wings. The pastel medium itself plays a crucial role in Sim’s practice—it offers softness and impermanence, a powdery intimacy that mirrors the fragile and ephemeral themes of his content. His use of color—glowing pinks, golds, cool greys, and saturated rainbows—enhances the emotional temperature of his work without ever becoming saccharine.

The same year, Sim returned to Scotland for his largest exhibition to date, “Two Rainbows and a Forest of Plants and Trees”, at Jupiter Artland as part of the Edinburgh Art Festival. The show transformed the gallery into a surreal forest landscape, complete with starry skies and interwoven trees. The installation blurred boundaries between internal and external landscapes, reflecting Sim’s experience of living between places and identities. The rainbow, an omnipresent symbol in his work, here functioned both as a natural phenomenon and a queer emblem—an axis between visibility and fantasy.

At the core of Sim’s work is a profound sensitivity to what it means to grow up queer, to live with longing, and to navigate memory, shame, and joy as intertwined emotional states. His art refuses irony or detachment; instead, it embraces sincerity, sentiment, and the rawness of being seen. The fantastical in Sim’s work is never escapist. Rather, it is speculative: a visual proposition for a world in which gentleness is strength and difference is a form of beauty.

Andrew Sim’s work has been exhibited at Gallery Baton in Seoul, Margot Samel and Karma in New York, The Modern Institute in Glasgow, and more. Through his ever-evolving cast of painted mythologies, he offers viewers a poetic refuge—a place where queerness is not simply accepted, but lovingly reimagined as a radiant, tender way of being.