Oona Grimes Hail the new Etruscan #1 |
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Oona Grimes a spritz of grrrls #7 2018 coloured pencil 210 x 297mm |
Private view: Friday 11 January 6 - 9pm |
Daily I would walk to Piazza Rotunda and beyond, just to be in Rome, early before the crowds; to watch the road sweepers and shop keepers setting up, to see the light changing over the city. Gradually those walks, and those films wove themselves into my dreams and my drawings. — Oona Grimes Hail the new Etruscan #1, Oona Grimes’ fourth solo exhibition at Danielle Arnaud, presents two new series of drawings developed during her recent residency at the British School in Rome, where she was the Bridget Riley Fellow 2018. They are influenced by Grimes’ long held fascination with post-war Italian cinema and the films designated as Neorealist. This canon of films ranges from Visconti’s Ossessione (1943) and Rossellini’s Roma Città Aperta (1945) to Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960), Pasolini’s Accattone (1961) and beyond. The first series of drawings, le comparse (2018), are, in the words of writer and director Tony Grisoni, ‘spare, crayon drawings on white [paper] of brutalised faces running with snot and blotched with cold’. The faces belong to extras from Italian films— ‘unknown players,’ according to Grisoni, who ‘without credit or lines of dialogue…inhabit the background action of Rossellini’s Roma Città Aperta, (1945) or Fellini’s La Strada, (1954).’ These are complemented by a series of larger stencil drawings on black paper entitled ragazze e ragazzi romani (2018). Here, Grimes layers images, patterns and colours in a fluid and hyper-associative way, combining, for example, ‘fragments of Etruscan porn dancing with pixelated vespas and the maid from [Pasolini’s 1968 film] Teorema.’ They are dotted periodically with repair patches, mirroring the restored frescos and stone work that Grimes encountered in Rome. The drawings belong to a larger body of work called Hail the new Etruscan, which fuses drawings, stencils and—in a new departure for Grimes—film. The exhibition at Danielle Arnaud is the first of three solo exhibitions by Grimes in 2019. It runs in parallel to Hail the new Etruscan #2—an exhibition of six of Grimes’ films, at Matt’s Gallery from 19-27 January, and will be followed by Hail the new Etruscan #3 at The Bower in summer 2019. An accompanying essay by Tony Grisoni and a film script by Renée Tobe will be available as part of the exhibition.
You’re lured in spite of yourself, in spite of not knowing what the shady characters and disjointed hieroglyphics represent...Isn’t this what Grimes is seeking—a way to notate a reality that can’t be determined or resolved through narrative or catharsis? —Cherry Smyth My drawings are a celebration of the absurd, a transformation of ordinary objects and a simmering consommé of fact and fiction, an ongoing series of parallel worlds. They are an investigation into language, beginnings and ends of it, learning & losing it, neurological case studies, Alzheimer’s, slippage and mis-memory. Now tanglehead has nothing to say to brickface. Characters once locked in the personalities of hierarchical position must change as the power of speech is lost. —Cherry Smyth Grimes is currently a Visiting Lecturer at the Royal College of Art London and The Ruskin School of Art Oxford University.
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Oona Grimes
dirty sisters 2018 spray paint, collage and coloured pencil 75 × 110cm |
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Oona Grimes
mio dio and the nest is served 2018 spray paint, collage and coloured pencil 75 × 110cm |
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Oona Grimes
mio dio 2018 spray paint, collage and coloured pencil 75 × 110cm |
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Oona Grimes
the nest is served 2018 spray paint, collage and coloured pencil 75 × 110cm |
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Oona Grimes
roman sKandals (exhibition special edition) 2018 inkjet print on 308gsm hahnemule paper |
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Oona Grimes mani parlanti and biscottino 2018 spray paint, collage and coloured pencil 75 × 110cm |
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Oona Grimes angelo del fango 2018 spray paint, collage and coloured pencil 75 × 110cm |
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Oona Grimes roman sKandals 2018 spray paint, collage and coloured pencil 75 × 110cm |
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Oona Grimes, Installation view: Hail the new Etruscan #1, Danielle Arnaud. Photograph by Oskar Proctor |
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Oona Grimes la sorella Fontana (numero uno), cinzano and cherry soda and sempre le ginocchia, 2018 |
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Oona Grimes la maggiorate and Santa Veronica and Toto meets San Bartolomeo 2018 spray paint, collage and coloured pencil |
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