Grant Foster
John Moores 25 prize-winner Grant Foster graduated from Brighton then the Prince’s Drawing School, and had a solo show at the Post Box Gallery in May 2009. Foster’s characters bear witness to humanity at its most extreme, within paintings indicative of barbaric practices like butchery and torture. These subjects have included soldiers and martyrs, the typically male; fetishes of the grotesque take bestial authority over their surroundings and burrow into the facets of their own identity. In spite of this, there exists a human aspect, however feeble or malevolent. They are both victim and villain. Foster's use of paint subdues the details inherent in the figures. Despite their misogynistic and deviant nature, they have an enviable, anarchic freedom, which can come across as either confrontation or confession.
Keeper
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Painting
59cm x 69cm
Oil on canvas
Keeper is a surreal scene of filthy carnivalesque horror, thick smears of layered multi-coloured oils emerging out of a dark and gloomy monochromatic background. The ‘keeper’ appears mysterious, a monstrous sub-human figure from the artist’s imagined folklore, a polychromatic night soldier from our brightest nightmares. And so we wonder what unknowns is he keeping, and what secrets is he protecting?
£3,500
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