Based in Cape Town, South African artist #IanGrose explores painting as a medium of perception and visual thought. His practice combines rigorous technical investigation with a deeply human sensibility, using light, colour, and composition to question how we see and what it means to look in the present moment. Through scenes that oscillate between intimacy and enigma, Grose creates images that appear suspended in time, where precise detail coexists with an atmosphere of ambiguity, inviting prolonged contemplation.

Engaging both the history of painting and its contemporary relevance, Ian Grose conceives painting as a form of resistance to the immediacy of contemporary imagery—a space in which memory, experience, and imagination remain central to the construction of meaning. His work has been recognized with awards such as the Tollman Award for Visual Arts and the Absa L’Atelier Prize, and has been developed through international residencies in Paris and Berlin.

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Grose was born in Johannesburg in 1985, and lives in Cape Town. He completed a post-graduate diploma in painting at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town, in 2010 and in 2011, received the Tollman Award for Visual Arts and the Absa l’Atelier prize. He spent six months in residence at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, and works produced during this residency were exhibited at the Absa Art Gallery in Johannesburg in 2013. In 2019, he completed a three-month residency at SP ACED OU T, an institute located on an organic farm north-east of Berlin aiming to help artists enter into a dialogue with contemporary art far removed from the urban rush.

Grose held his first solo exhibition with Stevenson in Cape Town in 2013. He has participated in group shows including A Beast with Two Backs, Association for Visual Arts, Cape Town (2025); Space and Place at EIGEN + ART in Leipzig, Germany (2021); I have made a place at Norval Foundation, Cape Town, South Africa (2021); Gold at Yutaka Kikutake Gallery (2018); Exchange at Galerie Hans Meyer, Düsseldorf (2016); Home Truths: Domestic Interiors from South African Collections at the Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town (2016); I Love You Sugar Kane at the Institute of Contemporary Art Indian Ocean in Mauritius (2016), and Thinking, Feeling, Head, Heart at The New Church Museum, Cape Town (2014).

Two catalogues of Grose’s work have been published by Stevenson; Some Assumptions in 2014 and Small Paintings in 2015.