Grant Foster

Grant Foster was born in Sussex in 1982, studied painting at the University of Brighton, and then went on to complete The Drawing Year in 2006. In 2008 he was a prize-winner in the ‘John Moores 25 Contemporary Painting Prize’. Grant graduated from the Royal College of Art with an MA in Painting in 2012 and was selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries at the ICA in 2013 and the Threadneedle Prize in 2014. He lives and works in London.

"Working across painting, sculpture, collage, text and more recently sound, I use irreverence as a tool to readdress the dogmatic traditions of the past and the present infallibility of reason. My work is best understood within the parameters of a historical and political framework, where the old collides with the new and the popular skews the classical.

Employing the ideology of collage to circumnavigate systems of logic, I’ve become aligned to the notion of associative flow. Where the experience of walking down a street can be understood as a sensory cut-up mediated by chance. Within the studio I try to create an environment where open, pluralistic connections are made between the sources that fuel the paintings. Eclectic in scope, they range from children’s book illustration, tabloid news photography, seaside arcade entertainment, drawings, and more recently astrology and cosmological charts and maps.

The intention is to challenge rational systems such as cause and effect, bypassing preconceived mechanisms of control. This process of free association enables an intrinsically analogue process to occur, where the paintings become contact points for an experience of the world that is multi-dimensional, baffling and often irreverent."

Submitted by Blackbird Rook