Ed Gray Art
Painter of London Life
New Exhibition 2024
SHUT UP & STICK TO FOOTBALL
@ The Bomb Factory
The Bomb Factory
99-103 Long Acre
Covent Garden
WC2E 9NR
June-14 – July 14 2O24
Open Thursday- Sunday 12- 6pm
Darren Cullen | Emmely Elgersma | Ed Gray | Jamie Holman | Dion Kitson | Dominic Allan | Conor Rogers | Janette Parris | Mark Wallinger | Foka Wolf | Wankers of the World
Press Release
The Bomb Factory Exhibition Review
https://southlondon.co.uk/area/southwark/outsider-not-offsider/
Detail from Still Dreaming, Wembley Euros Final 2020 160cmx120cm
Ed Gray in the Urban Activist February 2024
‘Viewers of Gray’s work start with the tiny circle of their own experience, but gradually through his paintings they acquire more expansive ways of seeing around us and understanding each other. Market forces might have outpaced a democratic form of development in our cities, but the humanistic mind that Gray feeds with his painting can still grow and elevate the value of a shared community’ © 2024 by The Urban Activist
https://theurbanactivist.com/idea/can-art-save-local-communities/
Ed Gray in Spitalfields Life
‘Ed’s visceral paintings capture the tumultuous street life of the capital superlatively, teeming with diverse characters and delighting in the multiple dramas of daily existence. Despite his mild manners, his is an epic, near-apocalyptic vision that glories in the endless struggle of humanity within the urban stew. Yet the overriding impression is not cynical but rather a life-affirming raucous celebration of the indefatigable vitality of Londoners’ © 2024 The Gentle Author, Spitalfields Life
https://spitalfieldslife.com/2017/08/21/ed-gray-artist/#comment-1164329
Scenes of Innocence & Experience House of Annetta Exhibition Review
https://southlondon.co.uk/area/southwark/the-innocence-and-experience-of-an-artist/
Watch Ed sharing the stories behind his paintings on Ed Gray Art TV
View tours of Ed’s recent Scenes of Innocence & Experience exhibition at House of Annetta Spitalfields here…
https://youtu.be/6YF6UBIz0Mc?feature=shared
See Ed in the official Paul Weller video for Movin’ On directed and produced by Monomedia Films 2018
https://youtu.be/zetwUICmGPg?feature=shared
Online Shop
Limited edition prints of London Life. View the Ed Gray Art Print Collection here
Paintings of City Life
Ed Gray is a painter of city life and the layers of urban stories and people that create the modern city. Traces of recognisable lives lived within the city are revealed in these gritty metropolitan moments drawn from the shadows of the dark grimy streets of London to the glittering spires of the Shard. These paintings are not caricatures, instead they are street scenes that celebrate the character and characters of the city and the theatre of urban life. Everyday people are keenly observed and drawn into sketchbooks to inform paintings that are a multiplicity of events and incidents. The resulting exuberant scenes resonate with allegory and symbolism, revealing the diverse relationships of people to their built environments and to one another within those spaces in a unique empirical exploration of civic identity.
Transmetropolitan Tapestry
Ed Gray’s paintings are enthused with the spirit of Hogarth, Dickens and Lowry. Nothing is imagined and everything is sketched from life in the streets and painted onto canvas in a collective transmetropolitan tapestry of London, New York, Mexico City, Tokyo, Bangkok and Cape Town and wherever else he may find himself drawn deep into the layers of lives lived in our cities.
‘….If for once we may suppose nobody to be everybody, as everybody is often said to be nobody, then this work is dedicated to everybody by their most humble and devoted William Hogarth’
William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty 1753
The Daily Telegraph ‘Ed Gray’s paintings explore the myriad facets of the bustling metropolis’
Robert Elms BBC London.‘Ed Gray’s paintings are not still lives, but motion pictures. They are musicals; buzzing with jazz and the glorious accidental choreography of crowds.’
Southwark News ‘The urban chronicler of our time’
Totally Thames Festival ‘Gritty contemporary snatches of London life pulsing with allegory and mythicism’
Recent art residencies and workshops
Primary School workshop at The House of Annetta 2023
Mural residency 2023
9 metre observational drawings & mural painted by Years 4, 5 & 6 for Boutcher Primary School Bermondsey
https://southlondon.co.uk/area/southwark/outside-in-mural-at-boutcher-primary-school/
Life-drawing, sculpture & animation residency Boutcher Primary School Bermondsey 2023
Inspired by the Rite of Spring, a collaboration between Ed and pupils from years 3,4 & 5
https://youtu.be/62sP19QizpE?feature=shared
Boutcher & Co Printmaking Residency with Year 5 inspired by William Morris 2022
https://southwarknews.co.uk/news/community/william-morris-leaves-an-imprint-in-bermondsey/
A Bermondsey Progress: Life-drawing, painting collaboration with Year 5 inspired by William Hogarth 2021
https://southwarknews.co.uk/area/southwark/ten-out-of-ten-for-year-five/
Mexican Muralist inspired by Ed Gray’s Mexican paintings 2023
Mexican artist Tomas Guerena created a beautiful large-scale mural in California inspired by Ed’s 2008 painting of El Moro Churreria Mexico City
Tomas and his Mural in California…
