Andrew Grassie The documentation of a small act: wooden blocks, gesso. (After Vantongerloo), 2024
34 x 28 cm (framed)
Andrew Grassie's new series of works draws on the artist's interest in the documentation of small-scale modernist sculpture in the first part of the 20th century. Grassie began to stage still lifes and to photograph them in such as way to approximate the aesthetic of those seemingly casual photographs. While the artist produced a number of assemblages that faintly echo early modernist works, this work more concretely refers to an existing sculpture by the Belgian painter, sculptor and architect Georges Vantongerloo (1886-1965). This painting is based on photos of a near facsimile of the sculpture produced by Grassie.
The new series of paintings constitute an alternative and imaginary history of art: a painting of a photograph of a sculpture assembled in such a way that it recalls the way modernist sculpture was at one point photographed.
