STEVENSON is pleased to present Ian Grose's second solo exhibition at the gallery.
In this exhibition, Grose uses the leitmotif of his previous show - images of folded, patterned fabrics - as a starting point from which to explore the nature and interpretation of painting. The new works stem from an attempt to see painted images as thresholds between opposites; an integration of both aspects of ultimately reductive conceptual pairs. As the artist explains:
Quite unexpectedly, a number of distinct series have emerged in my work, in which a set of assumptions and preoccupations were combined and reframed. In particular, my view of the history of painting as different articulations of the tension between surface and depth has been central. In a sense my mind is still in the mid-20th century when that opposition was regarded self-consciously, although I'm approaching it free from the theoretical constraints of the time. Now, as always, the handling of the paint dictates the nature of the threshold, the window.
A parallel investigation has been the relationship between depth and superficiality of meaning. I was led to draw from Renaissance and Baroque pictures of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary (which share a shape with the frame of my studio window) as well as from unremarkable floral prints. My interest is in their respective capacities for being metaphors for painting itself, as well as their very different types and strategies of communication -- a difference I wanted to examine in light of the pregnant emptiness of abstraction.
In a similar paradox by which pictorial depth can manifest on a flat plane, I wish to retain a sense in which the surfaces of daily life can be seen to contain the deepest things I know.
Grose was born in Johannesburg in 1985 and lives and works in Cape Town. He completed a postgraduate diploma in painting at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town, in 2010, after a BA majoring in English Literature and Art History. In 2011 he received the Tollman Award for Visual Arts and was awarded the Absa l'Atelier prize. He spent six months in residence at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris in 2012, and works produced during his residency were exhibited at the Absa Art Gallery in Johannesburg in 2013. His first exhibition at Stevenson, New Pictures, took place in 2013.
The exhibition opens on Tuesday 22 July 2014, from 6 to 8pm.
The gallery is open from Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm, and Saturday from 10am to 1pm.
Grose will give a walkabout in support of the Friends of the National Gallery on Friday 25 July at 11am. Cost is R20 (members and non-members); all are welcome.
