Irene Grau: Incohérent Walk

January 11 – March 16, 2019
Reception, Friday, January 11, 6 - 8 p.m. with artist lecture at 5 p.m.

Walking Through Green Spaces
of Santiago de Compostela
Dressed in Green Clothes
Carrying a Green Painting

to les incohérents

Image courtesy of the artist and Maus Contemporary.

Vincent van Gogh, amongst other plein air artists – those who painted landscapes while outdoors – pioneered a pictorial nomadism of the landscape they sought to capture. Later Impressionist artists moved beyond this nomadism, dissolving the horizon and blurring the landscape, eliminating the contrasts of light and shadow that defined the form. Irene Grau’s work similarly reconceives landscape through the possibilities and experimentation presented by monochrome painting (the use of only one color).

One of the earliest examples of monochrome painting was developed by a group of witty artists called Les Incohérents in Paris during the late 19th century. The monochrome was born as a conceptual joke, precisely to belittle the work, in the form of graphic criticism. These artists used monochrome painting to create an ambivalent relationship between language and landscape, a conceptualization that influences Grau’s work.

Irene Grau’s incohérent walk, seeks to reevaluate, once again, the landscape genre, exploring the idea of displacement, a core concept in her artistic practice. Incohérent walk transforms our thinking and speaks of painting and landscape as a way of seeing.