Grant Foster “Salad Days”

Ana Cristea gallery

poster for Grant Foster “Salad Days”

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Ana Cristea Gallery presents “Salad Days” British artist Grant Foster’s first solo exhibition at the gallery.

Foster’s work appears to offer nostalgic representations of pastoral settings and British Romantic painting; however, one of these is not like the others. The parade of fanciful, youth-filled canvases is brought into an eerie focus when viewed alongside the show’s single sculpture, a wax cast portraying the visage of Aubrey de Gray. The sunken eyes and lengthy beard of the most recognizable face in biomedical gerontology[1] contrast sharply against the ruddy, cherub-like subjects of Foster’s paintings. This overt incongruence is the first of several indicators that something is not as it seems.

The works were created using a traditional method of distemper painting. The Latin root of the word distemper means “to upset the proper balance,” signifying a disorder or disturbance, particularly of a political or social nature. Foster utilizes this etymological elasticity as a starting point from which to explore the role that images play in defining and establishing shared value systems, social norms and ideals.

The children and adolescents populating the canvases are drafted from a range of source materials: children’s books, illustrated forms of advertising and early 20th Century Russian propaganda posters. This stock imagery interrogates the notion of tradition as a form of cultural persuasion. We encounter a youth stepping on the back of a faceless, subservient man, a girl with her features covered over by bright red fruit, and another with several distinct physiognomies composing a single face. Hidden beneath the totems of so-called civilized culture, we find the barbaric truths of feudalism, serfdom, colonialism and imperialism.

Historically, culturally sanctioned imagery maintained the balance and order that rested on dominance over “the other.” In looking back, this imagery takes on the role of interlocutor in our ongoing dialogue with the past. It offers up a standard of comparison, so we might plot our present coordinates and begin to refine the truths that we tell ourselves. However, as we trawl through thousands of images daily, ever fixated on the next swipe, this negotiation of social norms and ideals is evolving rapidly. With the proliferation of the image, we witness the democratization of image making. We see a world fractured and pluralistic, and the site of cultural domination is no longer clear. Foster’s body of characters function as a disembodied and schizophrenic caricature of this on-going negotiation between moral values and the trappings of contemporaneity.

Media

Schedule

from September 10, 2015 to October 10, 2015

Artist(s)

Grant Foster

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