IAN GROSE - GOODBYE EBONY HORSE

Goodbye Ebony Horse presents a new body of work by South African painter Ian Grose in his first solo exhibition at Galería Karen Huber. This series marks a shift in his oeuvre to date, reflecting an emerging concern with metaphor and theatricality. Grose allows images to surface from memory and imagination, discovering and adjusting their meaning in the process of construction. The works explore the novel possibilities that open up by a renewed engagement with old methods, chiefly the manipulation of light, volume and perspective. This is less a quotation of style than an exploration of the principles that made pictorial illusion possible. Working largely without photographic references or models, he relies on an imagined idea of illuminated volume—using it as a generative framework in which every element is deployed in an effort to balance formal and symbolic values. Through this approach, he reconsiders painting's role in a visual age defined by the proliferation of dematerialized images. The title Goodbye Ebony Horse, drawn from The Thousand and One Nights, refers to a tale in which a magical wooden horse grants its rider the power of flight—and is ultimately destroyed. For Grose, this story reflects the ambivalent nature of invention itself: our fascination and reliance on what we create, and the inevitable sense of fragility and consequence that accompanies it. Throughout the series, figures in ambiguous relationships inhabit stage-like spaces where light and shadow shape a fragmentary narrative. Grose's imagery does not seek to illustrate stories but to find visual metaphors for the tensions that define contemporary experience—between power and vulnerability, wonder and loss, the human and the artificial.