AN EXHIBITION of work by London artist Ed Gray, Londonessence: Adoration is on display at the GX Gallery from October 10 to October 26, 2014. The gallery will also be launching Ed Gray’s new book featuring his work from 2008 -2012.
This beautifully made, 130 page book, reveals Gray’s approach to painting city dwellers and city life in the world’s most awe inspiring metropolises. From London to New York, via Mexico City, Tokyo, Bangkok, and Cape Town. The accompanying exhibition will showcase some of the works featured in the book.
London artist Ed Gray graduated from a Fine Art degree in 1995, trained to be a school teacher and taught art and design at a South London secondary school for four years. As a result of his work becoming commercially successful, Gray left his teaching career and has worked as a professional artist ever since.
Primarily a painter of London, his birthplace, and inspired by artists such as Hogarth and Breughel and the Tintin cartoons of Herge that he loved as a boy, Gray has previously worked in New York, Mexico and Tokyo to depict life in these cities.
‘I go out drawing in the streets to find characters to paint. These are real people, real moments in time, depicting the ebb and flow of city life. I aim to celebrate and commemorate these people; to leave a trace of these lives lived with my pen, my charcoal and my paintbrush’.
Increasingly recognised as one of the great contemporary painters of London and Londoners, Gray’s work explores the modern city in all its guises. Walking city streets with sketchbook and pencil in hand, Gray takes his inspiration from the real life he encounters. Back in the studio, each piece realised celebrates the day to day struggles, ambitions and aspirations that the urban environment provokes in the lives of Londoners, from the everyman and woman to familiar faces on the London scene. There is something for everyone in Gray’s work.
GX Gallery, 43 Denmark Hill, London, SE5 8RS
Tel: +(0) 20 7703 8396