3mm is the first exhibition in our gallery by artist Irene Grau as part of Apertura Madrid Gallery Weekend. In her latest work the paint is born from what is discarded when cutting the stone. 3mm of residue, of material that loses its corporeity to retake it on the canvas, playing with shapes and their disappearance. In a scale of grays that enunciates the cracks of what is apparently solid and that conform as a whole a landscape that points out alternative paths and routes initially imperceptible.
The multiplicity of ways in which the construction of the landscape can be approached through painting is the starting point of Irene Grau’s work. The artist dissects nature to rescue elements that, addressed from a new perspective, are transformed into painting and is where they find the ability to express themselves in a pure way. They are contradictory works in which the simplicity of a single material, or a single tone, reflect the complexity and power of transformation that can contain a single element. In his latest works he searches for the cracks in the processes that mark a linear productive system that also condemns the forms that natural elements must adopt.
3mm is what is lost when cutting the stone in any marble shop. That which simply disappears in a cloud of silica dust and water when the cutting disc breaks the silence of the stone and passes through it. 3mm is almost nothing. It is an indeterminate mass that is no longer solid and distances itself from the immortality and permanence of stones. A stone that has lost its form and with it all its productive hopes, thus reaching the end of a process of colossal forces that begins in the mountain and ends in our kitchen in the form of a countertop.
At that moment in which the stone becomes residue and the linear economy finds its limit, another process opens up – much more uncertain – that plays with the possibilities of that which has ceased to be what it was and has lost the independence of its form. The residual form thus becomes the motif and matter, theme and substance, of a moldable painting that ventures into the gray and in which geometry appears and disappears, in the same way that happens with the mortar that inhabits, as a patch, the interstices of an old stone wall.
Irene Grau (Valencia, 1986) holds a PhD in Fine Arts from the Polytechnic University of Valencia, she received a scholarship for Academic Excellence and the FPU scholarship. Her work has been recognized with awards such as the VII Premio Cervezas Alhambra de Arte Emergente which will presented at ARCOmadrid 2023, Generaciones 2018, Gas Natural Fenosa 2017 MAC Scholarships for Artistic Creation Abroad and Isaac Díaz Pardo de Artes Plásticas, A Coruña, or Premio Mardel Artes Visuales. In 2016 she was included in the Forbes “30 Artists under 30 – Europe” list. Recently she has shown specific projects at APPLETON Square in Lisbon, Fundación Cerezales Antonino and Cinia – FCAYC in León; Maus Contemporary in Birminghan (US); IVAM in Alcoi, Valencia, or DIDAC Foundation in Santiago de Compostela.
3mm
September, 8 – November, 12 2022
Irene Grau
Galería Juan Silió
C/ Doctor Fourquet, 20. 28012 Madrid.
Opening hours during Apertura Madrid Gallery Weekend September 8 to 11.
Thursday: 11am – 10pm.
Friday and Saturday 11am – 8pm
Sunday 11am – 2pm
Opening hours
Tuesday – Friday,
11am – 7pm
Saturday,
11am – 2pm