As vivid as the frenetic beauty of a de Kooning, or Matisse’s ecstatic tones

Meet new artist Grace James:

The painting is an event; it is a microcosm, a macrocosm. In ‘Fertile On the Dancefloor’ the homunculus stretches, curls, gyrates, and reclines in a multitude of forms. Hieronymous Bosch’s ‘Garden of Earthly Delights’ is being riffed on here, but in a distinctly 21st century way: there is a reference to Banksy, the zodiac, a recurring surrealist eye motif; the elements are not cartoons, but they are cartoonish. The hand cracking an egg out of which comes a figure and the reappearance of gestating figures call up the theme: an infinitude of origins, played out in a volcanic but harmonised palette, the reds, yellows, and oranges evenly dispersed. This magmic flux is typical of Grace James’s paintings, and in ‘Headspace’ the composition of human minutiae on a large scale can’t but feel topical, summoning as it does ideas of the inextricable interconnectedness of living beings. Like those of contemporary Iranian painter Ali Banisadr these are primordial, abstract scenes.

‘Headspace’ takes place in a palette as vivid as the frenetic beauty of a de Kooning, or Matisse’s ecstatic tones, though James’s colours are markedly of the digital age. In ‘Turn’ the artist pushes the connection between the fluidity of paint and that of the human form into new realisation, in colours that hum and vibrate. Without imposing an intellectual perspective, these protean paintings provoke an embodied reaction in the viewer. There is something egalitarian about them. ‘Spectacle’ could also be seen as a continuation of Hironymous Bosch in contemporary draughtsmanship, the emphasis here on the humour of bizarre hybrid forms: a winged pig, a rhinoceros balancing on a fried egg. These works compel you to get involved in the detail, or absorbed in the overarching whole; they are about who, what, and why you are – an ‘Identity Crisis’ (the title of another painting) as flamboyant as it is expansive.

Fertile On the Dance Floor So You Better Not Kill the Groove by Grace James