About the work

Andrew Grassie has created Palette, 2022, especially for Whitechapel Gallery to accompany the exhibition A Century of the Artist’s Studio: 1920 – 2020, 24 February 2022 – 5 June 2022.

Grassie’s photo-polymer etching, takes as its source a photograph of the artist’s painting palette. The palette, which Grassie has used for many years, contains six colours:  top left ; cadmium yellow middle, top centre; cadmium red middle, top right; mars black, bottom left; oriental blue, bottom centre: titanium white, bottom right; raw sienna. Grassie uses egg tempera as a medium to paint with, which mixes raw pigments, chalks and egg yolk. Using this restricted palette of colours, he is able to make close approximations of most of the colours found in the photographic images he chooses to work from.

Before transferring to the etching plate, the image was translated to grey scale, leaving just tonal representations of each colour. In recent paintings, Grassie has become interested in reducing the saturation of an image to very low levels and flattening-out the middle tonal values - at first, playing around with some nocturnal images taken whilst out walking during the lockdowns, lightening these to reveal what was going on in the shadows to reveal elements that were previously unseen. Grassie’s interest in the process of looking -  revealing through reduction or removal,  is also present in this image of the palette, where one can imagine what is missing, namely colour.

About the artist

Andrew Grassie (b.1966 Edinburgh, Scotland; lives and works in London, UK) paints highly detailed, photorealistic and intimate paintings whose subject matter is often where art is made, stored or exhibited. These spaces are usually empty of the artist or the viewer in the gallery. An inevitable contrast exists between the sublime quality of the painting and the banality of the subject as by using the Renaissance technique of egg tempera, Grassie elevates the mundane, leading to a meditation on the practice of painting itself. Grassie’s Studio Propositions series recreate photographs that he has taken himself, found on the Internet or sourced from archives. They depict a view of one end of the artist’s studio that has been arranged to create a fictional work space of another artist, where there are only the vaguest hints of artworks being made. His work raises questions about the relationship between documented reality and the constructed illusion of the artist’s studio.