ROKEBY is pleased to present Brad Grievson’s first solo exhibition. Grievson’s new work continues his interest in converging relationships between image-making, material and surface. Located somewhere between collage, painting and drawing, Grievson purposefully folds subject matter and narrative into the material processes that compose his works. 

A recent development in the work, and one potential starting point for the exhibition, are two works made last year in New York. A pair of paintings use pages from a photographic directory – from which the artist has removed the images – as their content. The remnants, or empty windows of the cut-up pages – fragile, and constantly on the verge of losing their form – are translated through a complex printing process onto the surface of the panels, “suspended [in a] state between partial and total destruction.”

It is of particular relevance that it is the displacement of the original images from the stock photographic archive that produce the content of new work. Work made from the remnants or leftovers from other projects foregrounds the artist’s interest in the shifting relationship between images as both material and readable form. 

Tensions between imagery, reproduction and the materials used to generate the work are underlined in the new work, which includes works on paper and a series of decal-transfer paintings on canvas. In the latter, simple marker-pen drawings, pages torn from books and other studio trappings are photocopied onto a decal, which is then applied to the surface of a white canvas. The accumulation of carefully orchestrated ‘errors’ in the final images give the paintings a sense that they are, in part, depictions of the multiple processes that produce them.

Two works on paper are made using the technique of rubbing to create graphite facsimiles of additional frame-like forms. The process means that the artist can overlay planes onto one surface and varying pressure allows for the obscuring and sharpening of detail in the final image. In different ways, Grievson’s works document the accrual, circulation and transformation of the collected material and imagery from which the artist works. 

Brad Grievson graduated from the Royal Academy Schools in 2013 having completed his BA at Chelsea College of Art in 2008. Recent group exhibitions include, Like a Virgin, which is currently on view at VI, VII, Oslo, Norway and Inshore Fishing at the gallery in 2013

*image (left)
Brad Grievson,
Floor Collage, 2014,
Transfer on Canvas, 51 x 41 cm
courtesy of the artist and Rokeby Gallery