IRENE GRAU | THE CARRIER

1 July 2022 - 27 August 2022

Summerbreak 29 July 2022 - 9 August 2022

With The Carrier, Irene Grau encompasses a series of actions that she carried out in the Swiss Alps during the summer months of 2018, referencing the practice of hiking as well as the traditions of landscape painting and monochrome painting. In this project, the Spanish artist set herself the premise of creating a series of backpack paintings and using them to undertake a series of hikes in the footsteps of important Swiss landscape painters such as Caspar Wolf, Alexandre Calame, Aberli, François Diday and Ferdinand Hodler. The aim was to reconstruct the walks of these painters in the alpine mountains and to revive them. Each backpack painting, which is always based in size and color palette on a painting by one of these famous Swiss painters, was painted outdoors shortly before heading out on the hike, so that the drying process of the painting corresponds to the course of the hike. In addition, each painting is supplemented by notes in the form of a booklet that includes the route, elevation information, time, and photographic documentation of the hike. In this way, the landscape adheres to the painting on a physical level. It is fair to say that Irene Grau is a conceptual pleinarist (open-air painter) who assumes that the work is ‚only‘ what remains of an experience that goes far beyond a traveled landscape or studied architecture. She is aware that the pictorial translation of this experience always remains incomplete. Nevertheless, her works always have enough clues to allow the viewer to reconstruct the path she has taken and to orient himself in his own perception.