Manor Grunewald

Jun 24

‘EXTERNAL HARD DISK / WORK’ Part I & II

24.06.2023 — 27.08.2023

Exhibition view, ‘EXTERNAL HARD DISK /WORK part 1’, PLUS-ONE Gallery, 2023

With his second solo exhibition at PLUS-ONE Gallery, Manor Grunewald will present a new line of work spread in to two parts:

EXTERNAL HARD DISK /WORK part 1
EXTERNAL HARD DISK /WORK part 2

A girl looking sideways at her phone
someone softly breathing
an industrious student with hiking boots.

°
Not unlike all of these, Manor Grunewald rides an image. He reassesses painting, titles as well as production are mechanical and serial. Magic arises as in scale, overlay or s simple 90 degree rotation.

Manor Grunewald speaks of space and scenography as paper, and dips it in a soft yellow for the two sequenced exhibitions at PLUS-ONE this summer. While the first series (24.06—23.07) is made up of smaller romantic still lives, the second series (08.08—27.08) of large black and white images, play with heat-resistant foils and grids bent by error through reproduction. Printers and publications from art history and amateurs, coauthor his work. Soft, skilled hands show how-to’s and more or less exemplary fruit and vegetable tableaus here attain mysterious depths and shines of blacks. He seeks painting beyond its gesture, while dry transfer Letraset traces his practice like fingerprints. In EXTERNAL HARD DISK /WORK, IKEA’s flat minimalist designs figure in the space, holding the middle between graphic arrangement and painterly archive.

Ocular opulence, and moirés, not unlike for the girl looking sideways at her phone.

Manor Grunewald (°1985) lives and works in Ghent, Belgium.
Manor Grunewald doesn’t limit himself to neither one technique nor one material. In his images, consisting out of edited prints, the process of adding, eliding, zooming and enlarging are crucial. Certain details in the image are very focused or highlighted in a very thoughtful way, while others are submerged from the eye. The reproduction of the images and how we look at them are vastly one of his subjects.
Manor starts out of his personal archive of imagery, this exists out of images that aren’t related to art whatsoever and where for example hand labor are central, as we can see someone laying floor tiles in one of the works. Next he scans these images and edits them so they look close to screen prints, which they are definitely not. In the same way his older paintings leaned towards the graphic, whilst they weren’t prints at all. The artist regularly plays with this deception and really masters this technique by laying different layers and a certain crackling daze that’s hiding in there. Usually we don’t know whether the image was created via a digital or analog platform, how far the hand and the manipulation of the artist reach, but everything has its own meaning. For example the grids refer to the process of Photoshop and the bolts on the side or the Mecanorma-foil make an irreplaceable part of the entire work.
The room in itself, where the works are being displayed, is also crucial and is a medium of the whole installation. Manor Grunewald integrates IKEA shelves, racks or ready-made sculptures (with a nod to Donald Judd) that contain the archive boxes with the original
images inside (therefore they accommodate the origin of the works from this artist, that are extracted from the viewer’s eyes). The exhibition space itself, or a section of it, is regularly painted and made into a piece of art. 
Text written by Inge Braeckman