A FINE LINE: MATTHIS GRUNSKY / M.E. SPARKS

MATTHIS GRUNSKY / M.E. SPARKS: A FINE LINE
JUNE 12TH - JUNE 26TH, 2021

On a visual level there are few similarities between the work of M.E. Sparks and Matthis Grunsky, two artists who have been working side by side for some years now — sharing a studio after both receiving their BFAs from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and their MFAs from Emily Carr University. If there is something that links them it is their heuristic approach to dealing with rhetorical problems arising from modernist forms and techniques translated through screen-based experiences.

For M.E. Sparks, a fine line is drawn between abstraction and figuration that opens up a self-reflexive space within the clichéd and prickly territory of avant-garde and modernist painting. Confronting well worn tropes from artists such as Balthus, Derain, Picasso and others with references to her own daily life, Sparks strips bare both of these representational spaces to point at the uncertainties that lie between them. What results are paintings that are not only haunting and seductive, but also self-aware.

In his work, Matthis Grunsky makes use of material and digital systems to produce images that explore the aesthetics of computation. Working with computer code and experimental electronics alongside painting, drawing and plaster casting, he is interested in how we find meaning in chaotic information. Just as Sparks draws on the legacies of male painters only to question their dominant role in the paradigm of painting, Grunsky appropriates technology in ways that produce a short-circuit across the increasingly fine line between human and technological control.

Text: Patrik Andersson
Installation shots: Rachel Topham