Guy Haddon Grant :Mind’s Eye
Pi Artworks London is pleased to present Mind’s Eye, the gallery’s first exhibition devoted to London based artist Guy Haddon Grant.
Cloud Totem No. 2 (White), 2017, Platser, 255 x 50 cm
Singled out by renowned critic, writer, and broadcaster Lucie Edward Smith as an “influential” sculptor who is outpacing established authorities in the contemporary art world, Haddon Grant (b. 1986) continuously demonstrates impressive dexterity in his inspired approach to concept, material, and process.
Enter Guy Haddon Grant’s studio with us. His monochromatic sculptures and drawings occupy a space between abstraction and figuration. His sculptures ascend with casual spontaneity and disruptive force; his drawings, ephemeral in nature, grapple with the tension between density and lightness. Caught in between the traditional and contemporary worlds, Haddon Grant loosens his stroke, abstracting natural forms, prefencing dynamism and emotion over surgical accuracy. At this intersection, classicism bleeds into contemporaneity.
In this exhibition, we encounter a new body of work driven by explorations around memory and space. Take for instance the Blackboard Studies. On hand made blackboards, Haddon Grant chose to draw a litany of bones and vertebrae that have been strewn throughout his studio space for years. Magnifying and rendering their familiar yet alien forms, he records a history of his creative environment with these ossified remains. This line of aesthetic investigation interrogates and rearticulates personal tropes that define a decade of his artistic practice.
The exhibition space amplifies the highly dialogic environment of the studio which informs Haddon Grant’s practice. Sculptures in a familiar totem format speak to large scale cloud drawings, flirt with small charcoal studies, and bounce off newer chalk drawings. Mediums intermingle, sculptures begin to inform drawings and vice versa. The works move seamlessly between abstract motifs that are figurative in aspect and visceral structures that seem to follow an internal psychic schema. Mother, a figurative totem sculpture, explores Haddon Grant’s new curiosity with archetypal groupings, universal symbols, and other primal human individualities. Harnessing the collective unconscious as an ephemeral medium, Haddon Grant captures complex yet familiar human stories in sync with our times and balanced with historical precedence.
Mind's Eye will run from 13 July until 14 August 2021, Tuesday - Saturday, 12-6pm or by appointment.
