Julian Grater's new work opens a painterly dialogue with the uncertainty and delicacy of the Arctic's natural phenomena, and through contemplative and elegiac reflection, he physically and psychologically constructs his landscapes. Grater's work sits on the border of a figurative and abstract style, representing mountainous scenes, weather stations, and the presence of man in the seemingly infinite white landscapes of the Sub Arctic and Arctic North. Grater's work subtly blends the borders between contemporary science, art and politics. The exhibition presents not the conclusion of a body of work but the genesis of a project that will develop for many years to come.
In the 19th century the world's fascination with the vast unknowns of the Polar Regions exploded with a fervency and vigour that is testified to in both their actual exploration and their imaginative exploration. Compounding fact and fantasy, the idea of the Arctic Sublime gripped the scientific and artistic communities. This inspiration spilled into the 20th Century with artists and essayists such as Rockwell Kent who saw an austere, stark yet wild beauty in the Arctic and Lawren Harris who saw art as "a realm of life between our mundane world and the world of the spirit." It is now Julian Grater who carries the torch of our Arctic obsession into the 21st Century, recovering the great age of Polar painting which has an increasingly poignant contemporary resonance.
The inspiring and terrifying history of the Sub Arctic and Arctic North is pictorially enmeshed in the present tense of Grater's work, and hints at an even more overwhelming future. Nonetheless, immanence abounds within the heavy mineral colours which dance with a contradictory lightness of foot in the aurora borealis as the figure of the artist himself stands amidst the light percolating from the sky, appearing as the guilty counterpart of Friedrich's self-assured Wanderer. When the eyes of the world turn to the Polar ice caps for some sign of the fate of our climate, Grater introduces man not as the Romantic explorer soaking up the vast landscape passively but instead as an uncanny and wilful cohort in its very destruction.
Grater's work has been informed by several outstanding residency opportunities; in 2006 and 2004 he took up residencies at Leighton Studios, Banff Centre for the Arts, Canada, funded by Arts Council England, Banff Centre scholarships, and Rootstein Hopkins Foundation. In 2001, he participated in the Thematic Residency SloMo, also at the Banff Centre, research from which another major facet of the Lichen Factor project work developed entitled Biomarkers, being an extensive and ongoing body of drawings and photograms which examine the fossils of the Burgess Shale. Prior to this, in 2000 Grater took up a self-directed residency at the Fine Art Faculty of The University of Alaska, Fairbanks, USA which was funded by funded by Southern Arts. Grater has exhibited widely in both group and solo shows, and has in the past been a visiting lecturer at several British Art Schools, including Falmouth and Norwich.