Manor Grunewald on Sunday-S
Manor Grunewald focuses on the process of transforming images, whereby the printing process itself, as well as the results achieved with various printing techniques, plays a special role within his compositions, in which order and chaos, the creating, breaking, interrupting and dissolving of structures, are all key elements.
With his most recent series titled “External Hard Disk (E.H.D)”, he delves as a first step into the mechanisms and printing process techniques of the 1970s and 80s. As the starting point of his pictorial compositions, he uses coloured films, which were used by graphic designers at the time for the simulation of colours in layouts. Onto the still partially transparent films, a coloured dot matrix was printed, with which – when laid over the layout – simulated a coloured printing result.
Grunewald lays these films – on which the logos of the producers, including “Letraone” and “Normatone”, are visible – over selected paper fragments (often black-and-white copies of, for example, sheets of paper, pages from magazines and books, billboard grid structures and the like) and chooses particular details or overlaps. He then copies the resulting collages, which generally include fragments of basic geometric forms such as rectangles and squares, using black-and-white or colour printers. With these copies, he provokes incidences of light and invites coincidence and inaccuracies. He then scans the composed image and transfers it to a synthetic canvas as a UV print.
In a final step, he then makes minimal gestures with spray-paint, acrylic and oil on these printed canvases. The result is a work, in which the coincidental, the erroneous, the printed, the digital and the analogue, as well as the manual gesture of the artist, can hardly be differentiated, but which coalesce to create an entirely new image with its own unique language. Grunewald’s pictures are created within a field of tension somewhere between chaos and order. Viewed on a micro-level, numerous details from the creative process are revealed, including micro-rasters, grid structures, etc., whereby these details are held in place and surrounded by large basic geometric structures.
photocredit Jan Opdekamp
Link to artist page
Link to Q&A with Manor Grunewald
Tags: Manor Grunewald, Sunday-S