Art Unmasked

Joe Grieve (born 1997) holds a First Class Honours Degree from the City & Guilds Art School in London. Grieve currently lives and works in London, UK. While studying at the City & Guilds Art School, Grieve held his first solo exhibition at the Artisan Space in 2019, and contributed paintings to the group exhibition Into the Cosmere in 2021. After graduating in 2022, Grieve held his first solo exhibition Somewhere Near Perception with the BWG Gallery. Between Place & Time is Grieve’s second solo exhibition with the BWG Gallery. In 2022 Grieve attended the Blackwater Valley Residency in Ireland and Coulston Artist Residency in Scotland. During the last twelve months Grieve has visited eight countries, in order to perceptually immerse himself in the ‘natural wildscapes’ that have inspired his latest supernatural surreal paintings. Grieve’s work is held in the Nixon Collection, the Cao Collection and numerous private collections across Europe, South & North America.

Through making landscape paintings, Grieve finds himself engaging in reveries and nostalgia from remembered landscapes and experiences. They reference actual places merging poetic rural ideals, sometimes underpinned with fragments and marks from urban angles and the sound of the city. In bringing together these elements, Grieve celebrates the unique qualities of painting, constructing illusory spaces through mark-making and strokes of colour.

Using primary drawings and found imagery as starting points, these references go through a transformation as the paint takes on a life of its own; the act of painting and its vivacity being key to Grieve's practice. His approach is playful, and often relies on experimental mark making. However, Grieve's aim is to evoke emotions that relate to his experience. He creates work that simultaneously provides a space in which we feel engaged with the familiar, whilst also getting lost within the spectacle of abstract accidents.

@joebennellgrieve