IAN GROSE: SOME ASSUMPTIONS

STEVENSON CAPE TOWN presents 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 his assumptions regarding the nature and interpretation of images. Drawing on commonplace subject matter as well as found imagery, ranging from fabrics to views through his studio window to Old Master paintings, the new works experiment with the tension inherent in various binaries employed to perceive painting. They 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:

"What if we applied the philosophic logic of a statement, the contradiction and then synthesis, to the oppositional positions in painting? Abstract and figurative, material and immaterial, description and concealment, world and image, surfaceness and windowness (and in all of these, the physical painting as both and neither; threshold and synthesis). I think that these basic enquiries can have metaphorical resonance, poetic capacity.

Consider Titian's Assumption of the Virgin in the Frari. The light is still shining, and she's still hanging there between earth and heaven. Similarly, there's the surface of the picture, and ultimately you can't get through."

The exhibition opens on Thursday 17 July 2014, from 6 to 8pm. 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. www.stevenson.info