Gurr Graham

British artist GRAHAM GURR’s career is a fraught story of hardships and perseverance whose multiple lessons, influences and experiences inform the minutely detailed, rich and shifting visual style of his oils, acrylics and drawings. Raised in Scotland and England, Gurr’s life was marked by his parents’ experiences of war and his own episodes overcoming victimhood. Trained in interior design and architecture, his works in pen and pencil also feature multiple framing devices, conveying a sense of interiority and shelter in two dimensions.

His influences range from realism in his still lives, through cubism and expressionism in his human figures, to abstraction and surrealism in his dynamic framing compositions. His striking, practically psychedelic palette of colors evokes the sun-drenched early expressionism of Cézanne and Van Gogh. Elsewhere, weathered forms drained of color allude to his island home of Malta. Dividing his works into multiple frames, planes and spaces that flow playfully between one another, Gurr creates symbolic connections between his manifold influences.