Gripface (ES) – European Bathe

Grip Face (ES)
“European Bathe” 2017
4c risograph on Favini Crush Grape, 250g/m2
DIN A4 (21×29.7cm), edition of 36
The print ships signed, numbered and stamped

Grip Face is the pseudonym of David Oliver, a Mallorcan artist born in 1989. He started painting graffiti as a teenager — customizing friends’ skateboard grips earned him the name — and has since built a practice that bridges public space and gallery walls. His work layers flat color fields, biomorphic forms, and abstracted faces into compositions that sit somewhere between street art and painting. In 2017, he spent a month in Vienna as Artist in Residence at the Jan Arnold Gallery (Q21, MuseumsQuartier), where he painted murals across the city and presented the solo exhibition #Exporteditems.

European Bathe is a four-color risograph referencing a mural Grip Face painted across Vienna during his 2017 residency. The image — fleshy, biomorphic forms with blank black faces — is a meditation on the Mediterranean migration crisis: “non-identities and polar disguises for a cold and wet sea.” The soft risograph texture on Favini Crush Grape paper adds an organic warmth that offsets the subject’s gravity, the bulbous forms recalling Philip Guston’s late figurative paintings.

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