Julian Grater in collaboration with Andrew Toovey
07.02.2000 - 28.03.2000.
MUSIC EVENT, PRESS AND PRIVATE VIEW:
04.02.2000. 7-9 PM.
A selection of new paintings and drawings by Julian Grater is launched in collaboration with Andrew Toovey, one of the countries leading composers. Toovey's new work for solo violin will be performed by Charles Mutter of the Smith Quartet and IXION Ensemble in the company of the paintings at Open Space Gallery, Reading.
This exhibition brings together the works of the artist and a composer/musician of a very different kind, in a stark, bleak but haunting alliance that has been unfolding and evolving for a number of years. Grater has previously worked on 'PASSION' with Peter Gabriel for Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ. Andrew Toovey has composed work inspired by Rothko, Newman, Rauschenberg and Riley.
Light has been an inspiration for both artists. What makes it so compelling is that ordinarily you can never be exposed to its warmth or illumination all of the time. Either the Earth rotates around the Sun, thus bisecting our day, you flick the switch to turn off the bulb or blow out the flame to extinguish the candle.
Light in painting however is permanent, whether the full-on sulphurous glow of liquids and steam in Turner, the twilight austerity of the fine, translucent, veiled tones and vapours of Mark Rothko or the sudden, abrupt, dematerialisation of Barnett Newman's 'Zips' that snap the paintings and draw us in closer to a sense of self-recognition and definition.
Light appears to us in many guises, the notion of a devotional object in an age dismantled by our own technologies seems somehow curiously aloof. These spectral transparencies as Grater refers to them, hint at a dematerialized life, forms broken open and examined under an incarnation of continual light that comes from within. In Hindu belief light is considered divine and cannot be touched or extinguished by a human breath and so in the hands of the artist that notion of reverence is maintained.
Julian Grater and Andrew Toovey, through their long association, express a synchronicity shaped out of a shared commitment to the notion of light as a metaphor for human consciousness and this work is an affirmation that sometimes, just sometimes it pays to play in the dark.
For further information and publicity photographs, please ring 0118 959
7752.
Further information on the artists can also be found on www.imatrix.co.uk/julian_grater
or www.ohos.org.uk and
www.bmic.co.uk/newvoices/.