Chris Grisley
Degree: Fine Art
University: Leeds arts university
Graduation Year: 2020
New Blood Art Commentary
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Notable Achievements 2021
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Working Small
Chris Grisley’s work is charged with history – the history of painting, eternal portraiture, and methodical mark making. Initially, his pieces exude a ‘stately’ air. But this is quickly (and slyly) undercut by so-called errors; smudges, smears, and imperfections add up to create deeply unnerving work. Always dramatic, Grisley’s use of scale and evocative brushwork transports us into another world, where we’re left to grasp for as much detail as possible. Ghostly figures are richly dressed, but faceless. White-lined figures melt into forestry. Viewers are left to contemplate anxiety itself, a yearning uncannily reflective of contemporary uncertainties. Grisley’s careful method, colouring, and tonal variety ends up bringing us back to ourselves.
Artist Statement
I like to investigate paint’s abilities for change. Of its physical error, smear, wipe and scrape. Of how successive layers of hue might change nothing into something. The ghostly canvases have become the visible monuments of an internal unseen state. I believe the works are timely in respect of my generation’s contemporary anxieties but yet are connecting beautifully to painting’s story of the scraping out of its own object. I like to work with method. Not with explosive mood but through structured pace, equilibrium and intention. It is therefore the repeated actions of making that construct these painting’s surfaces and tonalities. The paintings are concerned with the transfer of the interiority of the artist into the layered phenomena of voids, absences, uncertainties and emptiness.
Solo Exhibitions
(2022) Pillow Talk, Assembly House, leeds
(2022) Looking In, Creartives galllery 180, leeds
Group Exhibitions
(2023) -, Affordable Art Fair, London
(2023) Leeds Artists Show 2023, Leeds art Gallery, leeds
(2022) A Tittering Of Magpies, Wharf Chambers, leeds
(2022) MA degree Show, Leeds Arts University, leeds
(2022) -, Affordable Art Fair, Battersea London
(2021) The signature art prize, Degree art, London
(2021) Manchester art fair, White Circle, Manchester