Lost Grey Machines

On 20 November Elespe presented Lost Grey Machines, his first exhibition at Ivorypress. The show, which includes both painting and work on paper, offers a reflection on domestic life and how it affects the creative process, often using autobiographical details as a starting point.

Elespe uses his drawings and oil paintings as abstract diaries. ‘My domestic life and my studio life are completely intertwined and I think my paintings benefit from it. It gives them an added intensity in both their experimental and the actual content and subject matter’, explains Elespe in his interview with curator Hans Ulrich Obrist included in the monograph on his work that Ivorypress will publish on the occasion of the exhibition.

His work is marked by a constant search and is influenced by many different sources: from the visionary paintings of Charles E. Burchfield to the woodblock prints of Utagawa Kuniyoshi or Henriette Valium’s comics. Elespe’s gaze is both questioning of and complicit with contemporary painting and its many historical movements.

Images: © Pablo Gómez-Ogando. Courtesy Ivorypress