14 May
nothing on the painting board, thursday
5 May
dom reading cavafy while zander sleeps, monday night
3 May
gerda’s mirror
26 Apr
anne reading THE FACE from 1996, saturday night
26 Apr
view from my desk, saturday
24 Apr
self portrait for everyone who came to the party
4 Apr
sarah not as sad as she looks, saturday
10 Mar
emmelie on my studio carpet, tuesday afternoon
11 Feb
mirror mitchell, tuesday night
9 Feb
julia reading on her balcony, monday evening
6 Feb
marianne during the power cut, friday evening
5 Feb
shadow of lion’s head on parliament building, 7:15PM
14 Jan
warm evening, mirror, wednesday
12 Jan
emma reading with me in the mirror, monday night
7 Jan
matthew, monday
5 Jan
nicoletta in the dark next to kaaimans river, sunday evening
5 Nov
matt reading oryx & crake by the window, queenstown
13 Oct
fernando in his studio at parsons, NYC
20 Jun
marc with plant & miles davis, monday morning
19 Jun
winter jody, thursday evening
17 Jun
unathi after work, tuesday
13 Jun
dom, friday evening
3 Jun
grant, tuesday night
15 May
alexis karamazov, thursday evening
25 Apr
karin thinking about 2015, friday night
22 Apr
anna with orange hat, tuesday
17 Apr
nicoletta finally, thursday evening
17 Mar
gitte in her technicolour dress, sunday night
18 Feb
emmelie, monday night
4 Feb
kevin, kevin against the dying of the light. tuesday evening
30 Jan
michael, monday evening
15 Jan
frith XIV, tuesday night
9 Jan
shaheed, or whistler’s mother’s son, thursday evening
11 Dec
kirsten contrapposto, wednesday
11 Dec
fabi with gin & tonic, tuesday night
6 Dec
mia sort of, wednesday
3 Dec
beezy in his studio, tuesday
28 Nov
selfie with plants before athi’s show, wednesday
27 Nov
matt with beach towel listening to the collected works of midlake, tuesday night
25 Nov
matty as a french girl, monday evening
30 Oct
alan in the studio after watching protesters from the balcony, wednesday evening
11 Sep
yellow dress, wednesday afternoon
4 Sep
anton listening to before today like three times, wednesday
2 Sep
jess, monday evening
30 Aug
selfie with hat, friday evening
30 Aug
trees on signal hill, 11:45AM
29 Aug
mitchell, thursday
28 Aug
saddest playlist, wednesday
26 Aug
girl in pink with constant interruption
23 Aug
nic looking at the shadows moving, friday
20 Aug
anne listening to techno, tuesday evening
20 Aug
monday night
6 Aug
another leonard, tuesday
6 Aug
leonard, tuesday
5 Aug
houseman listens to jazz, monday
31 Jul
kerry with ‘compositional element’, wednesday
31 Jul
daniella prettymuch, wednesday
25 Jul
lerato in the new studio, thursday
24 Jul
bee with bookshelf, wednesday
22 Jul
girl with book, sunday
22 Jul
naomi late for yoga, monday
30 Apr
jarred listening to serious music, tuesday
25 Apr
alexandra, wednesday
10 Jan
myer, thursday
10 Jan
emma the patientest
10 Jan
jesse avec bling
4 Jan
george with purple hair, friday
3 Jan
oh man it’s jan, 1:35PM
30 Dec
candice listening to kendrick lamar, sunday
29 Dec
emma before asia quick, friday
29 Dec
dave pretending to read, friday
29 Dec
matthew
29 Dec
simone, thursday
Small Paintings Ian Grose I find myself surprised to have made a body of work like this, even while recalling what led me to this point. Towards the end of 2012, I returned from a residency in Paris where I’d been looking at, and loving, some of the precursors and descendants of the Impressionists (Manet and Vuillard in particular). I was compelled by a vitality of mark-making, a kind of counterintuitive description of form. Looking at the pictures close-up, the categories of abstract and representational seemed to dissolve; I really understood how these painters prefigured the Abstract Expressionists in their focus on the autonomous qualities of the mark itself. I also began to think that an appreciation of the meaning of the pictures had to take into account the conditions of making them from direct observation. My understanding of the pictures was limited if I didn’t understand the process, although it was a process with which I was very unfamiliar, having always worked from photographs. At the same time, I felt that my justifications for painting from existing imagery would be less evasive if I had some experience of another way of working. The first paintings originated from a set of rules I formulated in response to this curiosity regarding painting from life. In Cape Town I started making quick paintings from my fourth-floor apartment, mostly views of the city done at times when the light was changing rapidly. I wanted to give myself a tiny window of time, in order to force myself to work quicker, to select only the most important details, and not to second-guess myself once marks were put down. Accordingly, the pictures had to be small enough that I was able to finish them in about 20 minutes. I initially had no intention of exhibiting these pictures, but when a solo show presented itself at short notice, I decided to develop this strand of directly observed work into an exhibition which could stand on its own, and to set it apart from my
studio paintings. (Having continued with both ways of working for a few years, I no longer perceive them as entirely separate and am experimenting with showing them together.) At this point it was December, and some of my friends who have moved away from Cape Town were visiting their families. This is often the only time of year I get to see them, yet I didn’t feel I had the time to stop working. So, thinking I was confident enough to attempt portraits, I asked my friends to come and sit for me while I painted them. Having unwittingly strayed into such a rich tradition, I realised I had to again develop a set of rules in order to limit my options. The first was that the pictures had to be made in a single sitting, lasting between an hour and 90 minutes. I felt accountable to the time and limited patience of the sitter, which encouraged a sense of focussed urgency. Immediately after completion, I would photograph the painting and upload it to my tumblr (www.iangrose.tumblr.com). An interesting outcome of these rules was that the physical painting was more or less the same size as the image on a laptop screen. I felt that working this way redressed some of the distortions of scale, texture and time inherent in viewing paintings online. As subjects, I’ve used people I know, mostly from university or art school; occasionally the sitting is a result of a casual conversation with a stranger about what I do. At the moment, the subject is more of a pretext for a formal, material experiment than for psychological inquiry, although owing to the difficulty of sitting still for that long, the ‘atmosphere’ often becomes meditative, and I think that comes through in the picture. Asked to remain very still, they often pick a blank spot and stare at it for the duration of a normal movie, which after some time can elicit a kind of hallucination (a white wall, for instance, becomes suffused with colour) not dissimilar from the type of looking I’m trying to attain in painting them.
10 Dec
monday, just before 6AM
30 Nov
parliament, friday, 7PM
24 Nov
gardens centre in sun, 6:30PM
22 Nov
ugly building across the road, 4:30PM
8 Nov
lion’s head with weird clouds, 5:45PM
3 Nov
midnight-ish, cold front coming, fire & ice hotel
Ian 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. His first solo exhibition, Other Things, took place at Blank Projects in Cape Town in 2011. He was awarded the Absa l’Atelier prize in 2011, as well as the Tollman Award for Visual Arts, and spent six months in residence at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris in 2012. Works produced during his residency were exhibited at the Absa Art Gallery in Johannesburg in 2013. He has had solo exhibitions at Stevenson, Cape Town, in 2013 and 2014, and at the gallery’s Johannesburg space in 2015.
CAPE TOWN Buchanan Building 160 Sir Lowry Road Woodstock 7925 PO Box 616 Green Point 8051 T +27 (0)21 462 1500 F +27 (0)21 462 1501 JOHANNESBURG 62 Juta Street Braamfontein 2001 Postnet Suite 281 Private Bag x9 Melville 2109 T +27 (0)11 403 1055/1908 F +27 (0)86 275 1918 info@stevenson.info www.stevenson.info Catalogue 84 June 2015 Š 2015 for works and text: Ian Grose Design Gabrielle Guy Photography Mario Todeschini Printing Hansa Print, Cape Town