Edinburgh Art Festival

Andrew Grassie: Painting as Document

Talbot Rice Gallery is delighted to present a survey exhibition of recent and new work by Andrew Grassie.

Grassie’s practice over the past decade has slowly established him as one of the most individual artists working in Britain today. Grassie creates paintings of gallery interiors, often displaying temporarily borrowed pieces of other artists’ work. These not only reference the scale of a photograph, but equal it in detail: an updated, contemporary miniature, painstakingly executed in egg tempera. Grassie often arranges the work in fictional exhibitions that only exist in the painting, and in doing so diversifies into the role of curator - albeit a virtual one.

For his first major solo exhibition in Scotland, Talbot Rice Gallery has brought together a selection of the artist’s output from the past ten years. Grassie responds to this particular hang with new paintings of the installation itself, with the exhibition only becoming complete once these works take their places on the gallery walls.

Grassie’s work makes us question art world values, and the inherently derivative nature of contemporary art today. As onlookers, we are left to decide which has higher status - the original artworks represented within the paintings by Grassie, or the actual picture plane that he creates.

Andrew Grassie was born in Edinburgh in 1966 and studied at St Martin’s College of Art and the Royal College of Art in London in the mid to late eighties. The artist lives and works in London.
A major new publication will accompany this exhibition.

www.trg.ed.ac.uk

Also showing

The University of Edinburgh Torrie Collections

1 Aug - 27 Sept

Festival Hours
Mon - Sat 10am - 5pm
Sun 2pm - 5pm
Admission Free
Gallery events

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