Exhibition
Lee Grandjean: Home Truths
12 Nov 2016 – 31 Dec 2016
Event times
Open on Saturdays or by appointment
Cost of entry
Free
Address
- The Walls
- Essex
- Manningtree
- CO11 1AS
- United Kingdom
Travel Information
- Manningtree Railway Station is one hour from London Liverpool Street
This uncompromising installation of sculpture and painting has been made for North House Gallery, for the house as home. The sculptures are characters that occupy the rooms with all their rough edges showing. Everything is revealed. Rather than beauty, an authentic energy is what this work is about.
About
The energy in the sculpture is created by the evidence of the continuous visual argument that goes on in their construction. The materials used are those readily available in most builders’ merchants: 2"x2" timber;18mm plywood; steel mesh; scrim; cement and paint. The final rendered surfaces are texturally rich, and painted. There are fusions throughout the work: painting with sculpture, organic volumes with built structure and revealed cross-sections, linear drawing with modelled mass. The whole journey of the sculpture is apparent in the final state and everything is still seemingly in flux, still becoming.
During the making process, before the cut plywood shapes are incorporated into the building of the sculpture, they are used as printing blocks to begin making paintings on canvas, so there is a direct relationship between the building elements of the sculpture and the constituent parts of the paintings.
The artist's influences come from many sources but there are strong associations with the ambitions of early modernism, and from the latter half of the twentieth century, the visual language of animation and the cartoon,
particularly its expressive use by the American painter Philip Guston.
Grandjean says: "It is the challenge of imagining and creating a whole parallel world that excites me."