GRAU, Irene

All of Irene Grau work is focused on painting and landscape, and also on process and displacement. She does this through a rigorous investigation into the possibilities of monochrome painting and how it relates to landscape, as a genre and as a framework, but above all as experimentation, as a way of seeing from the action of walking. All of which is intertwined in the traditions of radical monochrome painting, mural painting, performative processes and conceptual art.

Often, her work is developed in series that are the result of a long specific research in nature – in situ -, sometimes accompanied by a period in the studio where she experiments with different materials and techniques, to finish in the exhibition space, where the work is again transferred and transformed to create an entity with the specificity of the space. The title of her recent doctoral thesis: ‘The painter on the Road’, sums up perfectly her interests and attitude towards painting. We could thus say that Irene Grau is a conceptual fullirist who assumes that the work is only “what remains” of a broader experience that goes beyond a travelled landscape or a studied architecture, because transmitting the experiential entails assuming a lack. Even so, her work leaves enough clues for the viewers to be able to reconstruct the road and orientate themselves in their own perception.