George Grie was born in May 14, 1962. He graduated from the State University in 1985 with a BA (Honors) Degree in Fine Art Education. From the onset of his professional career, the traditional routes of domestic art adopted by many of his peers was not an option. He chose instead to follow the more difficult and demanding path of surrealistic painting wherein clear, concise yardsticks of competence, draughtsmanship and painterly skills can be measured and judged warts and all.
The result of his endeavors during his relatively short career has brought a considerable measure of success with his last several shows in London. Stockholm and Helsinki. Grie's paintings are concerned with the portrayal of strong and powerful images relying on visual impact. They are about capturing visual paradoxes, sometimes they depict calm and contemplative moments, solitude, and sometimes melancholy. There is a stillness in his themes which conveys a sense of inner-reflection. Grie's use of distinction technique gives a stark contrast between the light source and the often dark tonality found in his paintings.
At the age of thirty-five, George Grie had decided to transform his artistic carrier dramatically. He moved to Toronto, Canada where he became a professional Multimedia Graphic Designer. His prime interest is in contemporary 3D modeling software and their applications. Applying his previous art experience and classical education in a new digital world brings him a compete freedom of expression. The latest digital artworks are an extraordinary visual record of his conceptual thoughts, fantasies and dreams. Often journeying into the subconscious, Grie's work shows a magical and playful, dream-like world laced with mastery details. It is not always a comfortable world. There is a great deal of tension and of alienation in the strange events taking place in the landscape of his imagination.
Surrealism. Philosophy. Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought. It tends to ruin once and for all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in solving all the principal problems of life." Breton would later qualify the first of these definitions by saying "in the absence of conscious moral or aesthetic self-censorship," and by his admission, through subsequent developments, that these definitions were capable of considerable expansion. The Surrealist diagnosis of the "problem" of the realism and capitalist civilization is a restrictive overlay of false rationality, including social and academic convention, on the free functioning of the instinctual urges of the human mind.
The term "surreal" is applied more generally to describe the juxtaposition of ordinary events, actions or objects in a manner where the totality does not comport with the ordinary "sense" or social decorum. In this sense it is the successor to the idea of the "fantastic" in Victorian art and literature.
There is no clear consensus about the end of the surrealist movement: some historians suggest that the movement was effectively disbanded by WWII, others treat the movement as extending through the 1950s; art historian Sarane Alexandrian (1970) states that "the death of Andr? Breton in 1966 marked the end of surrealism as an organized movement." However, some who knew Breton, and were part of groups he founded or approved continued to be active until well after his death. For example, Czech Surrealism Group in Prague, though driven underground in 1968, re-emerged in the 1990s. Still other groups and artists, not directly connected to Breton, have claimed the surrealist label. In addition, surrealism, as a prominent critique of rationalism and capitalism, and a theory of integrated aesthetics and ethics had influence on later movements, including many aspects of postmodernism. |
