For artist Ian Grose, painting is a mysterious challenge that has real rewards, writes Alexander Matthews.
As sounds of traffic float into Ian Grose’s studio above Longmarket Street in Cape Town, the soft-spoken artist is telling me about the paintings that form Some Assumptions, his new solo show at contemporary art gallery Stevenson.
He says they’re a way of asking how “these funny, anachronous objects have any function” when “everyone has a camera in their phone and you can enact the miracle of representation in a second”, resulting in a world “awash with images”.
The 2011 Absa L’Atelier winner believes he’s at the beginning stages of two paths: one is “figuring out paintings for myself”; the other is “figuring out how to make paintings for myself and for others”.
Grose wants to make paintings “that work”: an image that “pulls your eye and your mind back to it and you can dwell in the painting for a long time, visually, and also … you can constantly work out different meanings – or it just seems there’s a kind of inner mystery to it that you can’t quite get to the bottom of.”
When he produces paintings that he feels “work”, he keeps them on the wall of the studio and looks at them every day. “After two weeks, if [it’s] still doing something, then I feel there’s an inner engine to it and it’s just going to keep running.”
See full article by Alexander Matthews via Mail & Guardian.
WHERE: Some Assumptions is on at Stevenson Cape Town, Buchanan Building, 160 Sir Lowry Road, Woodstock until August 23. Visit.
