Anne-Marie Grgich

United States  • 1961

Presentation

The art of Anne Marie Grgich feeds and grows strength from accumulation. She piles image upon image. Sometimes words upon words. For the last couple of decades collage has been the primary architecture of an Anne Grgich work. Back at the turn of the century collaged elements as often as not acted as a kind of base superstructure or foundation for iconic painted figures. These images were sealed in complex layers of resin and paint that created enigmatic depths, both literally and figuratively, as they congealed and obscured that which lay below. Collage and painted lines and shapes existed in a kind of easy interrelationship. Visual meaning emerged from that interplay. During a visit to Sydney in 2009 the artist made two very large works that consisted almost entirely of collaged elements taken from posters and illustrated events guides. These 'snake women', which she may have considered not quite finished at the time, were in fact the basis of an emerging aesthetic in which collage came to the fore and asserted itself as the primary expressive vehicle of much of her art subsequently.

Anne Grgich was born in Los Angeles in 1961 but has become more or less a native of America's Northwest Coast, never straying for long from the Portland-Seattle axis that has produced a rich, fascinating and very particular vein of art, music, storytelling and cinema in the past half century or so. She began to make art spontaneously at the age of fifteen, surreptitiously drawing on the pages of books taken from the shelves of the family library. From the desecrated pages of those first forays into art making she moved into dissembling books in search of collage material and constructing books of her own. In one way or another the book stands at the very epicentre of her artistic practice (an early article on her books by Rose Gonnella was published in Raw Vision 22, 1998). Her unique, artist books are ruggedly physical. Pages can be as thick as boards. At times their literal depth is due to the process of layering one on top of another that constitutes so much of her work. As a result, her books often bulge and seem on the point of bursting the mooring of their homemade binding. They are, then, at once assertively present and strangely fragile. Turning the pages of a book by Anne Grgich is an intense experience. Image after marvellous image is revealed accompanied as often as not by creaking, sticking and a general resistance by the object to being viewed. 

Grgich's journey as an artist really began around 1981, after a kind of epiphany imposed by a terrible road accident and subsequent waves of physical and psychological after-effect. The accident left her in a coma for a while, from which she emerged determined to pursue art wholeheartedly, and with a messed-up memory and a kind of return to childhood out of which she had to begin her life journey again. She once described the feeling to me in this way: “I had become naïve, but I also would remember some things, and was still basically the same person. I just had my memory in the rinsed cycle of the washing machine – which you could call the wheel of fortune." I mention these things primarily because the mixing up of memory and experience that Grgich experienced is, in a very real way, how collage works in her hands, namely bringing together disparate fragments from the world of images and words, which are then reassembled, fixed and readied for reinterpretation. The relatively arbitrary nature of the collection and placing of images in the creation of collage pictures mirrors surrealist automatic techniques, designed to bypass the control of rational, utilitarian levels of consciousness in order to reveal (in the surrealists' view) deeper, more profound meaning.  

- Colin Rhodes


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All artworks of Anne-Marie Grgich
Fine Art Drawings, Tout était parfait, jusqu' à ce quelqu'un commence à pleurer, Anne-Marie Grgich

Tout était parfait, jusqu' à ce quelqu'un commence à pleurer

Anne-Marie Grgich

Fine Art Drawings - 20.1 x 16.1 inch

$2,597

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Who is the artist?

The art of Anne Marie Grgich feeds and grows strength from accumulation. She piles image upon image. Sometimes words upon words. For the last couple of decades collage has been the primary architecture of an Anne Grgich work. Back at the turn of the century collaged elements as often as not acted as a kind of base superstructure or foundation for iconic painted figures. These images were sealed in complex layers of resin and paint that created enigmatic depths, both literally and figuratively, as they congealed and obscured that which lay below. Collage and painted lines and shapes existed in a kind of easy interrelationship. Visual meaning emerged from that interplay. During a visit to Sydney in 2009 the artist made two very large works that consisted almost entirely of collaged elements taken from posters and illustrated events guides. These 'snake women', which she may have considered not quite finished at the time, were in fact the basis of an emerging aesthetic in which collage came to the fore and asserted itself as the primary expressive vehicle of much of her art subsequently.

Anne Grgich was born in Los Angeles in 1961 but has become more or less a native of America's Northwest Coast, never straying for long from the Portland-Seattle axis that has produced a rich, fascinating and very particular vein of art, music, storytelling and cinema in the past half century or so. She began to make art spontaneously at the age of fifteen, surreptitiously drawing on the pages of books taken from the shelves of the family library. From the desecrated pages of those first forays into art making she moved into dissembling books in search of collage material and constructing books of her own. In one way or another the book stands at the very epicentre of her artistic practice (an early article on her books by Rose Gonnella was published in Raw Vision 22, 1998). Her unique, artist books are ruggedly physical. Pages can be as thick as boards. At times their literal depth is due to the process of layering one on top of another that constitutes so much of her work. As a result, her books often bulge and seem on the point of bursting the mooring of their homemade binding. They are, then, at once assertively present and strangely fragile. Turning the pages of a book by Anne Grgich is an intense experience. Image after marvellous image is revealed accompanied as often as not by creaking, sticking and a general resistance by the object to being viewed. 

Grgich's journey as an artist really began around 1981, after a kind of epiphany imposed by a terrible road accident and subsequent waves of physical and psychological after-effect. The accident left her in a coma for a while, from which she emerged determined to pursue art wholeheartedly, and with a messed-up memory and a kind of return to childhood out of which she had to begin her life journey again. She once described the feeling to me in this way: “I had become naïve, but I also would remember some things, and was still basically the same person. I just had my memory in the rinsed cycle of the washing machine – which you could call the wheel of fortune." I mention these things primarily because the mixing up of memory and experience that Grgich experienced is, in a very real way, how collage works in her hands, namely bringing together disparate fragments from the world of images and words, which are then reassembled, fixed and readied for reinterpretation. The relatively arbitrary nature of the collection and placing of images in the creation of collage pictures mirrors surrealist automatic techniques, designed to bypass the control of rational, utilitarian levels of consciousness in order to reveal (in the surrealists' view) deeper, more profound meaning.  

- Colin Rhodes

When was Anne-Marie Grgich born?

The year of birth of the artist is: 1961