Andrew Grassie: New hang

Art Now, Tate Britain, London, 5 May - 19 June 2005

Andrew Grassie is a painter whose starting point is a re-examination of the fundamental question of what to paint.  He turns this question on its head, producing paintings which present a series of compelling propositions about painting itself, recording and representing scenarios such as the circumstances of their own production or display.

Grassie’s Art Now exhibition, New Hang, consisted of thirteen small paintings.  Each showed a different view of an exhibition in the space in which Grassie’s paintings were exhibited, Tate Britain’s Art Now room.  This exhibition was made up of works from the Tate collection, including well-known paintings and sculptures by historic British artists such as George Stubbs and JMW Turner, international modern ‘masters’ such as Barnett Newman and Pablo Picasso, and works by two living artists: Bridget Riley and Bruce Nauman.  Grassie’s paintings were hung according to the view of the room that they depicted. Thus, a viewer looking at one of Grassie’s pictures saw the space in which they were standing. They might also have noticed that the lighting in the room was exactly the same as in Grassie’s paintings. This doubling – of the space in the paintings and the space which the viewer occupied – created an uncanny dislocation which questioned our sense of reality, space and illusion.

To make New Hang Grassie selected, at intervals, works from Tate’s collection and installed them in the Art Now room between exhibitions.  Having mapped out the space and established his viewpoints (and thus camera positions), Grassie photographed the same set of views each time a new group of works was installed.  He then pieced together a set of images of the ‘complete’ exhibition: an impossible or, more accurately, implausible event. Then, working from these images, he painted the pictures that made up New Hang.

The title of the exhibition referred to the annual redisplay of the collection that used to take place at the Tate Gallery.  The annual ‘New Hang’ was an opportunity to see familiar works in fresh curatorial contexts. Grassie’s project offered a ‘virtual’ equivalent of such a re-display yet also challenged its methodology.  Viewers might have questioned Grassie’s choice of works, how they were displayed, and what readings and meanings emerged from the combinations he had pictured. In fact his choices were dictated simply by the desire to work with certain favourite artists and works and the formal demands of his compositions.  He stressed that there was no curatorial intention in his selection or his ‘hang’. Nonetheless, certain themes did emerge: contrasting depictions of the body in works by William Blake, Henry Moore, Hans Bellmer and Picasso, or the doubling seen in both Nauman’s Double No and The Cholmondeley Ladies.  Free from the burden of a curatorial agenda, Grassie enjoyed ‘accidental’ conjunctions such as the way Frederic Leighton’s Sluggard seemed to be flaunting himself to Picasso’s Nude Woman in a Red Armchair.  He was also interested in the way works of art using such radically different languages of representation were brought together in his paintings, which in turn employed yet another form of pictorial language.

Grassie’s way of working developed out of an impasse he found himself in while studying at the Royal College of Art.  Under pressure to develop a ‘signature’ style, he worked his way through many stylistic models, eventually reaching what he felt was a dead end.  His response to this was to start painting copies of his own work: a solution reminiscent of Samuel Beckett’s resignation: ‘I can’t go on. I’ll go on’.  Yet, Grassie found that in making what at first seemed like a kind of ‘dumb’ gesture – a wilfully negationist action in that it seemed to deny creativity – something new and interesting emerged.  Grassie explained: ‘My self-reflexive stance originated from the problem of what to paint, or rather how to justify it to myself. The technique of copying a photograph, rather than implying an interest in the ‘photo-real’, was simply a paring down to the bare bone of a practice.  What emerged out of this discipline was surprisingly expansive and referential’. One might say that because of his doubt about the practice of painting, Grassie’s work has developed as a way of providing him with excuses to make paintings. 

Grassie’s methods are relatively simple, if technically demanding, but from them emerges a complex and layered situation that can be misunderstood as a form of photorealism or appropriation.  He has said: ‘I am as much interested in the differences that occur in the “look” of my paintings from the photograph, and what this implies, than any proximity. They seem now to refer to the “silent gaze” of much seventeenth-century Dutch art and to certain forms of minimalism more than to photo-realism’.  As this suggests, Grassie is engaged in a dialogue with art history. As well as methodologies of creation, exhibition and display, his work addresses a strand that runs throughout art history, of artists drawing on the work of their predecessors for inspiration. A parallel strand locates copying (initially as a means of instruction) as fertile ground.  However, one should stress that work such as New Hang is not appropriation, for the works of art depicted are identified as real works within a real space and retain their original identity.  

Grassie has furthered this enquiry more recently with projects exploring the contexts within which exhibitions are staged, including  Private (2006) at Sperone Westwater, New York and Installation (2006) at Maureen Paley, London.  For Private, working once again from photographs, Grassie  focused on behind-the-scenes spaces at the gallery, his small canvases showing glimpses of works by fellow artists in offices, storage areas and hallways.  For Installation Grassie documented the programme of exhibitions held at Maureen Paley’s gallery in London in 2006, adhering to the mission statement: ‘install a series of paintings at the gallery depicting the year’s previous exhibitions during their installation. Each painting should hang at the very spot from which the image was taken enabling the viewer to compare the views of the space’. 

Grassie is a painter yet his practice suggests that we might consider his work in two further ways: as conceptual art, and as installation art.  Sol Le Witt argued that the use of conceptual frameworks and self-imposed conditions ‘eliminates the arbitrary, the capricious and the subjective as much as possible’.  But Grassie has found that ‘freedom from having to invent’ actually means he can locate self-expression in other aspects of his work, in painterly qualities such as ‘touch’ for example. 

The thirteen paintings that comprised New Hang have been dispersed since the show closed.  But in its complete form the exhibition existed as a single work which occupied (and activated) the space in which it was displayed.  It was site-specific, made for the Art Now room. As such it was essentially an installation in which the component parts happened to be paintings.