STANDING GROUND at Thames-Side Studios Gallery, London (7-22 September 2024)
Exhibition Text (Extended Version)
The drawings that became the extended series of sixty-or-so works, Diasporist Shopfronts (of which ten are exhibited here), began after a day trip taken by the artist to Canvey Island in the summer between Covid lockdowns, during which he was struck by the sight of an Orthodox Jewish family standing outside the ‘Island Glow' nail salon. The surprising presence of visibly religious Jews in such a typically English urban scene invited a deeper exploration of what it means to be Jewish within the English cultural and built landscape.
In a very 2020 version of ‘plein air’ drawing, Grad would drift and wander around Google Street View, waiting for something to catch his eye. Unable to participate in communal Jewish life, he describes the key emotional tonality agitating each drawing in terms of his sense of detachment, loss and isolation, and the connected feeling of longing for union, contact and intimacy.
The shopfront offers a particular kind of opportunity to the artist; not only does each facade carry a force of associative meaning, inferring a deep pool of resonances (time, location, activity, identity), but its formal qualities also invite and reward careful attention.
The shopfront itself can be seen to display some of the functionality of an art object, insofar as it has been conceived and designed to capture attention and lure in the viewer. This visual exuberance illuminates with its own particularism the everydayness of the often unloved, neglected, or otherwise rundown English high street. In this way, Grad’s drawings can be seen as an ekphrastic commentary on the overlooked everyday artworks that configure our urban geographies.
Through his detail-rich drawings, Grad insists that it is through a shift in attention towards our everyday surroundings that the extraordinary, even the ecstatic, can reveal itself.
In the context of landscape painting, the shopfront is something like a garden: a subject cultivated by human hands to draw in the viewer and to excite the eye. Indeed, Grad has described his series very consciously in the language of landscape painting, but what kind of landscape was available to the artist during a period of universal confinement?
The drawings, in their small size and use of coloured pencils, recall the challenging circumstances in which they were made: at home, with limited access to materials or studio space, during a particular moment in our collective experience. But they also speak to the larger story of the Jewish people in this country—its history, presence, the marks Jewish people make in this land.
Grad describes his delight at the way in which the project has taken on a life of its own, with many people contacting him to share memories and personal associations connected to the places he has drawn. He goes as far as to say that what most interests him about the project is this experiential web: how these drawings are an opportunity for such connections to instantiate themselves, beyond the walls of the gallery.
