Irene Grau

Spanish artist Irene Grau (born 1986 in Valencia) lives and works in Santiago de Compostela. Grau’s methodology focuses on color as a transforming agent of space, and its perception. A meticulous analysis of an in situ intervention and its transformation through color is quasi-ubiquitous in her work - an approach in the tradition of radical monochromatic painting, as well as mural painting, performative process, and landscape - the latter in a broad sense. The title of her recent doctoral thesis, The Painter on the Road, perfectly sums up her interest and attitude toward the medium of painting, and Irene Grau’s process could perfectly be described as a conceptual pleinairist, who states that her work is "what remains" of a wider experience, going far beyond the physically traveled landscape or an explored architectural structure. Solely transmitting an experience may well lack of concrete information, yet her work leaves enough clues to the viewer to allow access through process, intervention, and the document thereof, in order to visually and conceptually understand the artist’s modus operandi and artistic questioning and concerns.

In 2010 she was the recipient of an Academic Excellence Scholarship, followed by a 2011-2015 FPU Fellowship from the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport, allowing her to pursue her doctoral studies. She received her PhD in Fine Arts from the Polytechnic University of Valencia in 2016.
Grau is a recent recipient of the Premio Generaciones, one of the most prestigious Prizes in Spain, accompanied by an exhibition at La Casa Encendida in Madrid. Her work was also included in in the exhibition projects Minimal Gestures at Galerie Heike Strelow in Frankfurt, Germany; and Bajo el brazo. Entre la palma de la mano y la axila at the CaixaForum in Barcelona, Spain. In 2018 she had solo exhibitions at Atelier Fidalga, in São Paulo, Brazil; and at Robert Henry Contemporary in Bushwick / Brooklyn, New York and at didac.gal (DIDAC), in Santiago de Compostela, Spain.

Grau’s recent exhibition construction season at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art in Madison, Wisconsin, was her first one person Museum exhibition in the US.