IAN TWEEDY
GRUND
Excerpt from press release
For the exhibition, Tweedy will show a series of new paintings all completed in 2019.
There’s a saying, “Den Sachen auf den Grund gehen,” to get to the bottom of things. Grund also means a piece of the space or land that you stand on. In painting it refers to the base that you paint on—the most common example is gesso in my case, also book covers. Grund also means reason, like the belief to why you do a certain thing or take action. This can be a crucial part in art. Do you have a Grund/reason why you do art? What is it you’re standing on? What’s your base?
The abstract works began during my chemotherapy. I wanted to paint with the figure and free but with some definition. As I went forward, I discovered this was my attempt at “mindfulness” painting, grounding me. These works are abstract and yet suggest figuration.
Refering to Grund again is the background of these things—the base, the beginning of a painting. Grund, the base is drawing.
The large colorful paintings are the beginning of a series inspired by the book covers, but are more of a combination between the space, the flat plain found in American modern art, like Rothko and Motherwell, and figurative drawings in my work.
The figurative works are my attempt to draw a correlation between American abstraction (book covers that over time took the look of Rothkos) and my drawing formed from European historic art. A yellow painting is a scene of a Russian play about the revolution, suggesting a kind of timeless struggle.