ken grimes
space oddity
Ken Grimes, born in 1947, is fascinated by the possibility of extraterrestrial life and its influence on our world. The exhibition space oddity, organized in collaboration with Ricco/Maresca Gallery (New York), features some fifteen exceptional works by this artist.
At the age of 24, Ken Grimes experienced a synchronicity and set out to find other similar testimonies. Diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, his obsessive painting practice, punctuated by textual and visual messages, invites us to relive this experience. From that point on, if he works exclusively in black and white, it’s to disregard the lies of color and achieve a form of truth. His work was featured in 1998 in the major exhibition “Self-Taught Artists of the 20th Century: An American Anthology” organized by the American Folk Art Museum. He is now part of these collections, as well as those of the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.
Born in New York in 1947, Ken Grimes grew up in Cheshire, Connecticut. When he was in his twenties, he was diagnosed with schizophrenia and was forced to abandon his university studies. At the end of the Vietnam War, his father, who headed an arms manufacturing company, sold his business and built a tennis center, which would become a central theme in his son’s drawings. “I think my father felt somewhat responsible for my illness, so in a way, he wanted to be involved,” Grimes explained.
catalog published for the exhibition
ken grimes: space oddity
from november 2nd, 2023 to january 14th, 2024
