Grahame Parry

Gallery Morfi in Limassol presents the latest work of Grahame Parry. The exhibition opens on Tuesday, 31 January 2012.

In 2009 the art historian and writer Michael Paraskos wrote a critical review of the work of artist Grahame Parry under the title ‘The Urgency of Now’. The following text is an extract taken from that article which highlights not only the continuing influences on Parry’s work but also, perhaps more importantly, the effect of the contemporary social context within which it has been created.

“If there is a single most important influence on Parry’s work, it is surely his time spent at the Cyprus College of Art, first as a student and then as a tutor and assistant to the Principal Stass Paraskos. There are abstract elements in these paintings that are reminiscent of work by one of the College’s tutors, Geoff Rigden, but in the colour and organisation of space it is Paraskos who seems to have had the most impact. Indeed, some of Parry’s paintings seem to echo the sculpture wall, known as The Great Wall of Lemba, that surrounds the College’s campus near the town of Paphos. Like the images in Parry’s canvases, the wall is an amalgam of often very different objects, and it is notable that Parry assisted Paraskos during the main phase of the wall’s construction in the 1990s.

Yet Parry’s work is also very much his own, and one has a sense that there are very personal narratives going on in the paintings, about which the viewer can (and should) know very little. Most, if not all, artists draw on personal experience to motivate themselves to make art, but art is not a spontaneous outpouring and it is not a personal confession. As in Parry’s case, there is a need in all art for the artist to distance their personal experiences sufficiently well to allow the viewer a space in which to enter the work of art. In doing so, the viewer, and by extension the community for which the artwork has been created, makes it their own. This is a difficult balancing act, requiring the artist to retain enough personal commitment to a work of art to motivate themselves, and to give that work vitality and life; but also necessitating that they depersonalise it to allow the community to engage with it.”

In summarising, Paraskos goes on to refine his definition of ‘The Urgency of Now’ as ‘the urgent need for artists to practice a personal, material and sensual engagement with our existence as we live it now, even though that existence is in a predominantly impersonal, increasingly virtual and often boorish world.’

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