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Artist: Ken Grimes

parrasch heijnen presents Ken Grimes: Evidence for Contact, a retrospective exhibition of work by Ken Grimes (b. 1947, New York, NY). This exhibition is organized on the occasion of the release of a major book titled Evidence for Contact: Ken Grimes, 1991-2021 (Anthology Editions, 2023) showcasing the artist’s nearly 40-year career.

In Grimes’ work, graphic motifs and recurring patterns are the prima materia of an imagistic language. Often working with a black and white palette, simplified shapes, and flattened compositional forms, Grimes’ paintings and drawings postulate systems at once terrestrial and cosmic.

Alongside the extensive use of text in his artwork, Grimes visualizes modes of communication: radio signals, satellite transmissions, musical staffs, binary codes. As perceptual fields of energy and transmission, they offer a foil to the linguistic and enter the realm of the symbolic. Often working in series, Grimes’ variations on themes are attuned to the subtle nuances of system and codes.

At the time of the Vietnam War, Grimes’ father operated a business that manufactured parts for rifles, trigger guards, grenade launchers, and other weapons. In interviews, Grimes professes the anxiety he felt as a young man during the military draft, an event that preceded his diagnosis of schizophrenia. In Grimes’ work, militarized technologies are omnipresent structures in physical and mental landscapes.

In Untitled (The aliens at a distant solar system…) (2020), Grimes renders side-by-side depictions of the Earth as viewed from the solar system and a radio antenna erected in a field, the blue of the sky a small fraction of atmosphere beneath the opaque darkness of space overhead. In the lower half of the painting, Grimes provides metatextual and unpunctuated profusions of language––speculative alien fictions, ancient histories, and scientific developments.

Grimes’ preoccupation with extraterrestrial communication poses both existential questions and a fixation with the interminable pursuit of truth and connection. Of his process, Grimes says, “I’ll do four or five rewritings of the text; I’ll boil down the language, all the thoughts, and when it speaks clearly to what I want to say, I put it on a piece of drawing paper.”

Grimes’ insistence on clarity and precision in his artwork is not only based in the scientific but in the spiritual, an attempt to locate oneself within an incomprehensible universe.

Ken Grimes (b. 1947, New York, NY), lives and works in New Haven, CT. His work resides in the permanent collections of the Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI; the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA; the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Chicago, IL; and the American Folk Art Museum, New York City, NY. In the 1998 travelling exhibition Self-Taught Artists of the 20th Century, organized by the American Folk Art Museum, Grimes was one of the four extant artists among the thirty-one included. In 2018, Grimes’ work was selected as one of the exhibitions in a six-part yearly series titled Field Station at Michigan State University’s Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, East Lansing, MI. In 2019, Grimes was invited to participate in the deCordova Museum Biennial. The publication of Evidence for Contact: Ken Grimes 1993 - 2021 is being accompanied by exhibitions of Grimes’ work at Ricco/Maresca Gallery, New York, NY (October 26 - December 2, 2023), Galerie Christian Berst, Paris, France (November 2, 2023 - January 14, 2024), and parrasch heijnen, Los Angeles.