Grant Foster
In Defence of Civilisation, 2023, acrylic, caulk, collaged paint rags, pencil, pastel, oil, oil stick and spray paint on jute and wood
Cloudbusting, 2023, Acrylic, oil and pastel on canvas, 180x150cm
​Grant Foster (b.Worthing, 1982)is a London based artist who completed an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art in 2012. He works across painting, sculpture, collage, and text. Using irreverence as a tool to readdress the dogmatic traditions of the past and the present infallibility of reason. Foster’s 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, Foster is aligned to the notion of associative flow, where the front and back of each canvas is offered as interchangeable, compatible, and as a series of dualistic components in a wider meta-narrative. A non-hierarchical approach to the front and back of the canvas, resembles enlarged pages from a book or journal, standardised in height to absorb a human body. These act as doorways, or portals, into other viable worlds. Encompassing notational and sometimes satirical elements, of film, text and found objects. Grant aims to create a sensorial cut-up mediated by chance and predicated by an unseen system of coherence.
“I think of the viewer’s experience, mirroring the act of re-arranging the pages from a book, to reveal a different a layer of reality. My work has always explored the tension between knowing and not-knowing, the search for meaning, and it’s ever shifting forms.”
Within the studio, Grant generates an environment where open, pluralistic connections are made between the sources that fuel the paintings. Eclectic in scope, they range from children's book illustrations, tabloid news photography, memories of 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.
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Selected Solo Exhibitions
Human Made, Exeter Phoenix Gallery, UK (2024)
Open to You, Art Lacuna, London (2022)
I’m Not Being Funny, Lychee One, London (2019)
Ground, Figure, Sky, Tintype Gallery, London (2017)
Popular Insignia, Galleria Acappella, Naples (2016)
Salad Days, Ana Cristea Gallery, New York (2015)
Holy Island, Chandelier Projects, London (2014)
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Selected Group Exhibitions
Tell Me Everything You Saw and What You think it Means, w/Piers Alsop, Tagli Projects, Cromwell Place, London (2024)
Scared Back Into Y(our) Body (w/Jamie Fitzpatrick), ASC Gallery London, (2021)
Your Foot in my Face and other Tectonic Strategies, Kingsgate Gallery, London, (2021)
When you Waked up The Buffalo, Mihai Nicodim, Los Angeles, (2020)
A Stone in the Mountain (w/Georgia Hayes), Transition Gallery, London, (2018)
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Human Made installation shot Phoenix Gallery, Exeter 2024
Time At Hogchester Arts
"I bought a pad of smooth paper, at 70x50cm, paints, brushes, a few things to look at and found my way into making. Two weeks is a perfect time to work with limited means and the images started to fall from me. I love paper for the way it holds itself proud, without too much interference. I was preparing for a solo exhibition in Brighton at Phoenix Artspace, titled “Home to My Teenage Bedroom”. With hindsight, this show was about tangibility and paper, a connection to something a little older and deeper.
The first week Lucy and I would meet in the evenings for dinner and wine. She would read me excerpts from a book she was writing, and we would giggle like children, and I loved how fearless she is. When I would wake, I would try and bring a little of that fearlessness into the studio – dogs with erections, The First Lady’s hat, like Raiden’s from Mortal Kombat, my obligatory boots, standing on a continuous pencil line of guilt.
Once Lucy left, Bethany arrived, and we quickly bonded over experiences from our childhoods. The highlight was walking through Hell’s Lane with Bethany and Chantal, an ancient Holloway carved through years of footsteps through sandstone. Democratic carvings, some sacred and some profane. These carvings were eclectic in scope, Homer Simpson, a schematic deer, The Mushroom God, lions, cats, stars, spirals, people, cocks, and boobs. The tree roots were exposed deep into a foot-woven gulley – it felt magical and poignant, the artistry of the every-person, equality in sandstone.
Halfway through my time at Hogchester, I had a dream. My rear molar opened out into my mouth, and I held it beneath my tongue. I was sat in a car; I pulled it out to show my friends in the rear. I spat out a transparent moulding, ribbed like an ammonite. It glistened and there was a sense of awe.
I keep a dream diary, to know what’s what – so I don’t get confused. But I know I bought an ammonite from a gift store and still have it on my shelf."
