Irene Grau

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Irene Grau

Irene Grau, untitled photograph, 2017.

press release: May 5–August 5, 2018, State Street Gallery

MMoCA Opening: May 4 • 5-10 pm with an artist talk 6:30-7:15 pm (In conjunction with Gallery Night, admission is free.)

Join MMoCA from 5–10 pm for the opening of Spanish artist Irene Grau’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States. This MMoCA Opening includes a talk by the artist, live music and passed hors d’oeuvres from Fresco, and the evening features the unveil­ing of MMoCA’s first official beer.                                                             

6:30-7:15 PM  Irene Grau will discuss a new body of work she began during her five-week artist residency in Madison in the summer of 2017. Her plein air paintings draw attention to little-noticed aspects of the city’s environment and identify instances of monochromatic abstraction in everyday scenes. Grau describes her artistic interventions as “going out in search of painting with a camera and a pair of hiking boots on.” Seating in MMoCA’s lecture hall is limited.

8-10 PM    At 8 pm museum visitors can be the first to taste CES-001 Juicy Return IPA, CES’s brand new, limited release beer brewed by Octopi, and participate in a surprise artist-led activity conceived by Meg Mitchell. In addition to sampling CES’s specialty craft beer, guests can enjoy live music from DJ Phil Money, and passed hors d’oeuvres from Fresco.

Civic Exchange Society (CES), a multi-faceted and collaborative project initiated by artist Meg Mitchell, Octopi Brewing, Art & Sons, and the museum. The purpose of CES is to call attention to the art of creative exchange—the multiple ways individuals and organizations can combine talents, resources, and innovative thinking to encourage human connection through shared experiences. An outcome of this effort is the development of a new line of craft beverages, the first of which will be released at MMoCA on May 4, 2018. A hazy IPA packaged in an interactive can, CES-001 Juicy Return IPA signals the public launch of CES’s joint endeavors.

Irene Grau is a Spanish conceptual artist who challenges the boundaries of contemporary painting, the perception of color and the limits of space. Taking the act of painting beyond the studio and off the canvas, she enters into the landscape to discover moments when the power of pure color alters our awareness of the world around us. In Irene Grau: construction season, on view in MMoCA's State Street Gallery from May 5 through August 5, 2018, Grau will present a new body of work she began last summer during her five-week artist residency in Madison.

Grau's work is grounded in the history of plein air painting, an in-situ practice of outdoor landscape painting based on direct observation, initiated by artists such as Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Camille Pissarro in the latter half of the nineteenth century. These Impressionist leaders ushered in future experimentations in modernist art-making, including the most simplified expression of formal abstraction: the painted monochrome.

Playing with the concept and process of plein air painting, Grau traversed the Madison landscape not to recreate specific scenes with pigment on canvas, but to identify existing instances of monochromatic abstraction. She discovered a vernacular form of mark-making in the vibrant, color-coded lines and shapes spray-painted across the streets and sidewalks by utility workers. Appearing random and cryptic to the untrained eye, this sanctioned graffiti points to the subterranean infrastructure of pipes and wires that powers our city. By reframing the overlooked details within our everyday surroundings, Grau transforms a standardized mode of communication used by public works departments across the country into a series of monochrome paintings—plein air paintings not of landscape, but in it.