East Lothian’s Colstoun House presents The Other Side, Joe Grieve’s first Scottish Solo Exhibition, from Saturday, 4 May, to Sunday, 19 May, when Colstoun will open its gardens for the first time to the public. The exhibition welcomes the viewer to explore the artist's dualistic expressions that present the natural world and humanity’s physical and metaphysical imprint upon it. Hosted in The Coach House, it marks the first in a series of annual Colstoun Art exhibitions.
The Other Side, comprising a series of new oil paintings, some involving a drawn figurative compositional charcoal underlayer, considers Grieve’s immersive relationship with and memories of landscapes within the British Isles and their corruption and fragmentation over his lifetime.
Through his art, Grieve presents visible and non-visible networks of life that make up our natural reality. He presents two worlds: a surface landscape and a distorted psychedelic network more closely connected to nature buried beneath the earth, blurring the line between the two. Grieve’s work visually connects opposites, merging the peace and fury of peaks and depths, mountains and oceans, foregrounds and horizons, and tangible and intangible currents, notable in the rhythmic oceans and skylines of his painting.
The energy in Grieve’s painting comes from conflicts between representation and abstraction, reducing natural detail in certain paintings to better explore the sensations and feelings of landscapes, with sharper explorations of dark and light and fore and background shadowing to present depth and display his extensive use of layering. This contrasts directly with his more representative and novel inclusion of manufactured structures dwarfed by the warped perspective of the surrounding landscape. These symbolic elements epitomise the relationship between the human reality of destruction and expansion beneath the Earth’s ultimate power and deific grandeur.
Grieves’ work pays no reverence to national borders or other socioeconomic constructs; instead, it offers a painterly appreciation for the harmony and escapes these landscapes offer whilst equally highlighting their fragility. The paintings in this exhibition invite us to witness Grieve’s perceived realities of surreal, spiritual, and philosophical landscapes, homed in relatable environments. The Other Side sees Grieve’s understanding of land fragmentation grow and gives him space to expand his practical techniques and subjective supernatural surrealities to discover the other side.
Private View Saturday 4 May 6 pm - 8 pm
Opening Friday-Sunday 10 am - 3 pm
Early May Bank Holiday Monday 10 am - 3 pm
Closing 18th May
Instagram: Joe Grieve
press: The National, The East Lothian Courier
