Richard Grayson (artist)

Last updated

Richard Grayson
Richard Grayson, artist, writer and curator.jpg
Born1958
Nationality British
EducationEast Herts College of Art and Design, Newcastle upon Tyne Polytechnic B.A. Hons Fine Art
Known for Installation, Performance art, Video art, Art Criticism and curatorial work
Notable workMessiah, The Golden Space City of God, 2002 Biennale of Sydney
AwardsBritish Council Grant 1984, Arts Council of England project grant 2008, Artist in Residence, International Studio Programme, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin 2003-2004, Artist in Residence, Artpace, San Antonio, Texas 2009. Official site: http://www.richardgrayson.co.uk/

Richard Grayson (born 1958) is a British artist, writer and curator. His art practice encompasses installation, video, painting and performance. He investigates ways that narratives shape our understandings of the world. His art and curatorial practice focus on narrative and the visual arts, belief systems and material expression, and ways cultural practices allow translation between the subjective and social/political realms.

Contents

Career

Grayson was a founder member of the Basement Group [1] (1979–1984) in Newcastle upon Tyne. The Basement group was an artists' collective that focused on experimental time based and performance art practices. It has been described as "unique in this country [the United Kingdom] in combining two functions: it is an 'exhibiting society' for a group of six artists working in time based media (mostly performance and video), and it has up to the present provided a venue for any performing artist wishing to present work [in Newcastle]." [2]

Grayon's work has been exhibited at Matt's Gallery, London; [3] SMART Project Space, Amsterdam; Art Unlimited at Art Basel 2005, Switzerland; Museum of Contemporary Art Australia; Artpace, San Antonio, Texas [4] and included in the 17th Biennale of Sydney 2010, [5] "THE BEAUTY OF DISTANCE: Songs of Survival in a Precarious Age" and ARSENALE 2012: The First Kiev International Biennale of Contemporary Art 2012, [6] entitled "The Best of Times, The Worst of Times. Rebirth and Apocalypse in Contemporary Art".

Key works include: "Messiah" [7] , 2004, "Intelligence" [8] , 2005, "Ghost Houses", 2004–2007, "The Golden Space City of God", [9] 2009, "The Magpie Index", [10] 2010, a video focusing on legendary singer-songwriter Roy Harper, "The Magic Mountain" 2013, and "Possessions_inc", 20016-19 [11]

His critical writing has been published by Art Monthly , UK and Broadsheet, [12] Australia. He has written catalogue essays and monographs on Mark Wallinger, Roy Harper, Mike Nelson, Susan Hiller and Suzanne Treister.

Between 1992 and 1998, he was Director of the Experimental Art Foundation in Adelaide, Australia.

Grayson was Artistic Director of the 2002 Biennale of Sydney, [13] titled '(The World May Be) Fantastic', which investigated 'artists and practices using fictions, narratives, invented methodologies, hypotheses, subjective belief systems, modellings, fakes and experiments as a means to make works.'. [14] Writing in Art in America in October 2002, Michael Duncan said of the exhibition that it "gave free rein to complex, often offbeat works predicated on alternate realities. [15] Artists included: Mike Nelson, Chris Burden, Susan Hiller, Vito Acconci, Eleanor Antin, Henry Darger, Janet Cardiff and Rodney Graham. In an article in the Sydney Morning Herald from 17 May 2002, Bruce James describes the exhibition as "a hit". [16]

Grayson curated A Secret Service: Art, Compulsion, Concealment [17] in 2006/7, a Hayward Gallery Touring Exhibition; This Will Not Happen Without You: (Basement to Locus + 1975-2007) in 2006–2007, Arts Council of England Touring exhibition, Polytechnic [18] in 2010 for Raven Row, London, REVOLVER, [19] a series of co-collaborations with Robin Klassnik at Matt's Gallery, London in 2012 and Worlds in Collision, [20] the 3rd Adelaide International in 2014.

Grayson is currently a visiting lecturer at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford, [21] The Royal College of Art, London and holds the position of Bartlett Research Fellow at Newcastle University, UK [22]

Writing - art catalogues

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Grayson Perry</span> English artist, writer and broadcaster

Sir Grayson Perry is an English contemporary artist, writer and broadcaster. He is known for his ceramic vases, tapestries, and cross-dressing, as well as his observations of the contemporary arts scene, and for dissecting British "prejudices, fashions and foibles".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mona Hatoum</span> British-Palestinian multimedia and installation artist

Mona Hatoum is a British-Palestinian multimedia and installation artist who lives in London.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hito Steyerl</span> German filmmaker (born 1966)

Hito Steyerl is a German filmmaker, moving image artist, writer, and innovator of the essay documentary. Her principal topics of interest are media, technology, and the global circulation of images. Steyerl holds a PhD in Philosophy from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She is currently a professor of New Media Art at the Berlin University of the Arts, where she co-founded the Research Center for Proxy Politics, together with Vera Tollmann and Boaz Levin.

The Biennale of Sydney is an international festival of contemporary art, held every two years in Sydney, Australia. It is a large and well-attended contemporary visual arts event in the country. Alongside the Venice and São Paulo biennales and Documenta, it is one of the longest running exhibitions of its kind and was the first biennale to be established in the Asia-Pacific region.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wangechi Mutu</span> Kenyan sculptor

Wangechi Mutu is a Kenyan-born American visual artist, known primarily for her painting, sculpture, film, and performance work. Born in Kenya, she has lived and established her career in New York City for more than twenty years. Mutu's work has directed the female body as subject through collage painting, immersive installation, and live and video performance while exploring questions of self-image, gender constructs, cultural trauma, and environmental destruction and notions of beauty and power.

Michael Nelson is a contemporary British installation artist. He represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 2011. Nelson has twice been nominated for the Turner Prize: first in 2001, and again in 2007.

Anne Hardy is a British artist. Her art practice spans photography, sculptural installation and audio. She completed an MA in photography at the Royal College of Art in 2000, having graduated from Cheltenham School of Art in 1993 with a degree in painting. Hardy lives and works in London.

Rita Donagh is a British artist, known for her realistic paintings and painstaking draughtsmanship.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rasheed Araeen</span> English artist

Rasheed Araeen is a Karachi born, London-based conceptual artist, sculptor, painter, writer, and curator. He graduated in civil engineering from the NED University of Engineering and Technology in 1962, and has been working as a visual artist bridging life, art and activism since his arrival in London from Pakistan in 1964.

Diango Hernández is a Cuban artist, known for his paintings. From 1994 to 2003, Hernández was involved with Ordo Amoris Cabinet, which he co-founded with Ernesto Oroza, Juan Bernal, Francis Acea and Manuel Piña. He is married to artist Anne Pöhlmann. He lives and works between Düsseldorf, Germany and Havana.

Ranjani Shettar was born in 1977 in Bangalore, India. She is a visual artist, who is known for her large-scale sculptural installations. She currently lives and works in Karnataka, India.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev</span> Art historian, critic, and curator

Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev is an Italian-American writer, art historian and exhibition maker. She is the recipient of the 2019 Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence. Currently, she is the Director of Castello di Rivoli Museo d'Arte Contemporanea and Fondazione Francesco Federico Cerruti in Turin. She was Edith Kreeger Wolf Distinguished Visiting Professor in Art Theory and Practice at Northwestern University (2013-2019).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Raven Row</span>

Raven Row is a free art exhibition centre in Spitalfields. It was constructed from numbers 56 and 58, Artillery Lane. These properties were built about 1690. The area was formerly used for testing artillery and this portion of the lane was known as Raven Row until 1895. No. 56 and 58 had been rebuilt in the 1750s for use by Huguenot silk weavers and traders. The buildings were converted into a gallery in 2009 by 6a architects on behalf of Alex Sainsbury, who established a charity to run it. The inaugural exhibition was of work by New York artist Ray Johnson. Raven Row has held exhibitions by K.P. Brehmer, Iain Baxter, Adam Chodzko, Suzanne Treister, Peter Kennard, Hilary Lloyd, Harun Farocki, Eduardo Paolozzi, Stephen Willats and Yvonne Rainer. Other exhibitions have been curated by Richard Grayson, Lars Bang Larsen and Alice Motard.

Fiona Crisp is an English photographer and installation artist. She is also Professor of Fine Art at Northumbria University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Matthew Drutt</span> American curator and writer (born 1962)

Matthew Joseph Williams Drutt is an American curator and writer who specializes in modern and contemporary art and design. Based in New York, he has owned and operated his independent consulting practice Drutt Creative Arts Management (DCAM) since 2013l. He is currently working with the Nationalmuseum Stockholm on an exhibition and publication of modern and contemporary American crafts gifted from artists and collectors in the United States to the museum, originally organized by his mother, Helen Drutt. He has worked more recently with the Eckbo Foundation in Oslo on the first major monograph of Thorwald Hellesen published in English and Norwegian in by Arnoldsche Art Publishers. He is currently also developing several other titles with the publisher. Formerly, he worked with the Beyeler Foundation in Switzerland (2013–2016) and the State Hermitage Museum in Russia (2013–2014), consulting on exhibitions, publications, and collections. He continues to serve as an Advisory Curator to the Hermitage Museum Foundation Israel. In 2006, the French Government awarded him the Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, and in 2003, his exhibition Kazimir Malevich: Suprematism won Best Monographic Exhibition Organized Nationally from the International Association of Art Critics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Shirley Tse</span> Hong Kong-born American contemporary artist (born 1960)

Shirley Tse is an American contemporary artist born in Hong Kong. Tse's work is often installation based and incorporates sculpture, photography and video, and explores sculptural processes as models of multi-dimensional thinking and negotiation. She is faculty in the School of Art at California Institute of the Arts, and was the Co-Director of the Program in Art from 2011-2014. She is co-organizer of the ReMODEL Sculpture Education Now symposia series and has been visiting faculty at Yale School of Art, Northwestern University, California College of Arts and Crafts, and Claremont Graduate University.

Nicola Bealing is a Cornwall-based British painter.

Robert Owen is an Australian artist and curator. He lives and works in Melbourne, Australia.

Deanna Petherbridge is an artist, writer and curator. Petherbridge's practice is drawing-based, although she has also produced large-scale murals and designed for the theatre. Her publications in the area of art and architecture are concerned with contemporary as well as historical matters, and in latter years she has concentrated on writing about drawing. The Primacy of Drawing: Histories and Theories of Practice was published June 2010 and curated exhibitions include The Quick and the Dead: Artists and Anatomy, 1997, Witches and Wicked Bodies, 2013. She celebrated a retrospective exhibition of her drawings at Whitworth Art Gallery, University of Manchester accompanied by the monograph Deanna Petherbridge: Drawing and Dialogue, Circa Press, 2016.

Robin Klassnik OBE is the founder and director of Matt's Gallery.

References

  1. The Basement Group http://www.locusplus.org.uk/information/history
  2. Arnolfini Brochure from http://www.rewind.ac.uk/documents/John%20Adams/JA024.pdf
  3. His 2005 exhibit at Matt's Gallery was reviewed by Lillian Harris [ dead link ] in The London Review in January 2005
  4. Richard Grayson at Artpace, San Antonio, Texas http://www.artpace.org/artists_and_curators/richard-grayson
  5. 17th Biennale of Sydney 2010 http://www.biennaleofsydney.com.au/about-us/history/2010-2/
  6. ARSENALE 2012: The First Kiev International Biennale of Contemporary Art 2012 http://arsenale2012.com/participants/
  7. Richard Grayson, "Messiah", 2004 at Matt's Gallery, London |http://www.mattsgallery.org/artists/grayson/exhibition-1.php
  8. Richard Grayson, "Intelligence", 2005 at Matt's Gallery, London http://www.mattsgallery.org/artists/grayson/exhibition-2.php
  9. Richard Grayson, "The Golden Space City of God", 2009 at Matt's Gallery, London http://www.mattsgallery.org/artists/grayson/exhibition-3.php
  10. Richard Grayson, "The Magpie Index" 2012 at Matt's Gallery, London http://www.mattsgallery.org/artists/grayson/exhibition-4.php
  11. Richard Grayson, "Possessions_inc", 2016-19 online at Matt's Gallery, London https://possessions-inc.mattsgallery.org
  12. Broadsheet, published by Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia http://www.cacsa.org.au/?page_id=1369 Archived 26 January 2014 at the Wayback Machine
  13. 2002 Biennale of Sydney http://www.biennaleofsydney.com.au/about-us/history/2002-2/
  14. 2002 Biennale of Sydney catalogue (The World May Be) Fantastic ISBN   0-9580403-0-3
  15. Michael Duncan – Report From Sydney – Critical Essay Art in America , Oct 2002
  16. Why the Biennale is a bit of a miracle (The world may be) Fantastic: Sydney Biennale 2002 Reviewed by Bruce James. 17 May 2002. http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/05/16/1021540474378.html
  17. A Secret Service: Art, Compulsion, Concealment', Hayward Gallery Touring Exhibition 2006/7 http://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/find/hayward-gallery-and-visual-arts/hayward-gallery-exhibitions/catalogues/a-secret-service-art-compulsion-concealment
  18. Polytechnic exhibition at Raven Row, London http://www.ravenrow.org/exhibition/polytechnic/
  19. 'Revolver' exhibitions at Matt’s Gallery, London http://www.mattsgallery.org/revolver/revolver.php
  20. Adelaide International: Worlds in Collison exhibition http://www.adelaidefestival.com.au/2014/visual_arts/adelaide_international-worlds_in_collision
  21. Richard Grayson's profile at Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford http://www.rsa.ox.ac.uk/people/richard-grayson
  22. Richard Grayson's profile at Newcastle University http://www.ncl.ac.uk/sacs/staff/profile/r.m.grayson