North House Gallery. exhibitions, paintings, drawings, sculpture, original prints and books by modern and contemporary artists of East Anglian, national and international fame.

LEE GRANDJEAN

Home Truths

'Home Truths': what is being said may not be what is wanted to be heard.

This 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.

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."

Exhibition dates

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Open on Saturdays, 10 am - 5 pm

These images are a selection of the works available at the Gallery
Please contact the gallery for further information.

Exhibition venue: North House Gallery The Walls, Manningtree, Essex CO11 1AS
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