The exhibition Grisailles: Banquet of Light will present Miquel Barceló’s new series of large-scale still lifes, featuring banquets made up of sea life, flowers and ossified creatures. Rendered in monochromatic hues overlaid with translucent layers of colour, the artist’s new body of works pays homage to the tradition of grisaille painting. The exhibition, which takes place in Thaddaeus Ropac’s Seoul space, will be punctuated by paintings of bulls, a symbol of strength, as well as ceramic sculptures with rippling organic forms.

For Miquel Barceló, one of Spain’s most acclaimed contemporary artists, painting is a visceral way of relating himself to the world. Still life has been present in his work since the 1980s. The genre allows him to explore the objects and visual codes of the natural world around him, in particular the sea life that surrounds him on his native island of Mallorca, in the Mediterranean Sea. His practice is also grounded in a deep knowledge of the history of art. In the series on view in the exhibition, he draws on 17th-century Dutch painting and the Spanish bodegón to offer a new interpretation of still life painting that is anchored in his own relationship to the sea, sustenance and the cycle of life. Reprising the genre’s traditional codes, he bisects his canvases with life-sized tables, inviting visitors to participate in the curious banquet before them where they might contemplate their relationship with abundance.