Rives Granade makes gestural and energetic works on canvas that embrace the visual languages of drawing as they absorb fragments and ephemera from the artist’s daily life. At the core of Granade’s practice is a charismatic evocation of the complexities of the studio. Fields of paradoxical legibility and opacity are created as the artist transcribes found forms into rhythmic meditations on existentialism brimming with characters, shapes, and symbols. Occupying positions between the conscious and unconscious—visions, thoughts, desires, memories, and dreams—a life-long practice of communication and obfuscation hold steady in Granade’s fluid representations of countless internal selves. Granade’s engagement with abstraction through time has been decidedly self-referential—abstract painting swallowing its own tail. Always in dialogue with the history of Western Modernism, Granade also draws inspiration from Chinese ink painting, architectural plans, Japanese woodblock prints, Taoist talismans, and his two young daughters’ scribbles and sketches.

Granade (b. 1979, Mobile, AL) received a BA in philosophy from Washington and Lee University in Lexington, VA and an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Granade’s work has been exhibited internationally at venues including the Underground Museum, M+B, Harmony Murphy Gallery, and The Hole in Los Angeles, CA; Southern Exposure and Steven Wolf Fine Art in San Francisco, CA; Gallery Lara in Tokyo, Japan; Galleria Karen Huber in Mexico City, Mexico; Lehmann Maupin in Aspen, CO; and OCHI in Sun Valley, ID. Granade’s work is held in various public and private collections including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Marciano Art Foundation, Hara Museum of Art, Glendale College, and the Mobile Museum of Art. Granade currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA and is represented by OCHI.